This restaurant marketing podcast looks at the 7 most common mistakes Restaurant owners and their marketers make. Many are easy to avoid so have a listen and learn what you can do to increase your chances of finding new customers and turning them into repeat customers!
Are you making these restaurant marketing mistakes? The restaurant industry is tougher than ever, so you need to be bringing your A game to every part of the Restaurant game to increase Restaurant Profitability.
You don't want to have the best restaurant that no one has ever heard of!
Don't forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you're missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15-minute no-obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
**Apologies - due to an error with our hosting provider, the wrong episode was uploaded last week. This (hopefully) is the correct one!
We look at the big Restaurant Marketing Trends in 2023 and how you can use them to increase profitability in your Restaurant.
- How will AI change the Restaurant Industry - this will make a big difference for some Restaurants.
- Lastly, pricing. This will be make or break for some Restaurants so you need to get it right. We discuss the changes occurring and how you should think about the problem.
All this and more to give you ideas on how to increase the profitability in your Restaurant this year.
2022 was a tough year for a lot of Restaurants, and 2023 may be tougher, but there are a lot of opportunities, especially with changing consumer preferences.
Have a listen and see how these trends will affect your Restaurant.
Don't forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you're missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15-minute no-obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
We look at the big Restaurant Trends in 2023 and how you can use them to increase profitability in your Restaurant.
We discuss -
How smart Restaurants will be addressing labor shortages - a couple of really interesting ways to optimize your labor.
Targeting customer demographics to improve marketing success and profitability.
Restaurant micro niching.
All this and more to give you ideas on how to increase the profitability in your Restaurant this year.
2022 was a tough year for a lot of Restaurants, and 2023 may be tougher, but there are a lot of opportunities, especially with changing consumer preferences.
Have a listen and see how these trends will affect your Restaurant.
Don't forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you're missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15-minute no-obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
We look at the big trends across technology, the economy, competition, and consumers to see how they will impact your Restaurant.
This episode looks at consumer preferences and Restaurant Delivery. Because of COVID, delivery has been a big influence on Restaurant profitability. What will happen in 2023 and how can you make it profitable?
2022 was a tough year for a lot of Restaurants, and 2023 may be tougher, but there are a lot of opportunities, especially with changing consumer preferences.
Have a listen and see how this will affect your Restaurant.
Don't forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you're missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15-minute no-obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
We continue our 2 part episode on Restaurant Marketing ideas that we seeing working now. A lot has changed, so you need to be thinking about pricing, profitability and product to get the most of your marketing campaigns.
The biggest mistake we see with Restaurants and their marketing is..... Not Marketing. Have a listen to this podcast to learn how you can run some successful marketing campaigns to grow your Restaurant.
Don't forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you're missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15-minute no-obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
As the world emerges from COVID-19 and goes into a high inflationary environment we look at the essential things that you can do to increase customers in your restaurant and increase your profitability.
Restaurants are still closing down - caused by hiring difficulties, wages and cost pressures, and declining dining in, so your marketing needs to be on point.
We discuss what we see working for Restaurants now, and how you can increase revenue and more importantly, increase profitability.
Have a listen to the podcast and let us know what you see as working,
Don't forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you're missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15-minute no-obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
Hiring for restaurants is the number 1 problem for so many restaurants around the world right now. We cover some of what we see working for our customers and some of the ways that you can do more with less to make do with the staff that you have.
Not an easy problem to solve, but these ideas should definitely help.
Don't forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you're missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15-minute no-obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
This is Part 2 of our Restaurant Trends for 2022 podcast series.
We analyse the trends for Restaurants, Restaurant customers and employees along with the big macro economic trends and then discuss how they will impact Restaurant operators and what you can do in your Restaurant to improve Restaurant profitability.
Don't forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you're missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15 minute no-obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
What are the macro economic trends that will impact Restaurants and more importantly Restaurant profitablity.
We analyse the big trends along with changes in technology, changes within the restaurant customer base and just as importantly - your team.
We put all these together to discuss what the big trends will be for Restaurants in 2022 and how you can benefit from them.
Don't forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you're missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15 minute no-obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
What is the "Great Resignation"
How will it impact your Restaurant?
We discuss ways to best manage your most important asset, your people.
Don't forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you're missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15 minute no-obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
We discuss why your Google My Business account is so important and give you simple steps to grow your revenue with a GMB account that works.
Have a listen and make sure that you are ticking all of the boxes that Google needs to send you all of the customers that your Restaurant deserves.
Don't forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you're missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15 minute no-obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
This is the second part of podcast series on how delivery aggregators are destroying the Restaurant industry.
We discuss what tactics restaurants are using to build profitable Restaurant delivery businesses.
If you missed part I, make sure you catch up on it, because we discuss all of the issues, particularly with Deliveroo.
Don't forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you're missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15 minute no-obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
This is the first part of podcast series on how delivery aggregators are destroying the Restaurant industry.
Deliveroo and their Dark Kitchens could see a fundamental difference to the way we eat, with negative impacts for employment, food quality and even, I believe, social cohesion.
Have a listen to understand the real impact on Restaurants.
Part II will cover what we can all do.
Restaurants are often the route to the middle class for immigrants who don't speak their new countries language and cooking or working in a restaurant is their first opportunity in their home.
The real innovation of delivery aggregators is the ability to pay below
Don't forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you're missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15 minute no-obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
Restaurant Yield optimization is an advanced technique for restaurant profitability, but there is nothing stopping all Restaurants from implementing some of the easier techniques.
We discuss how it can work in your Restaurant.
Don't forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you're missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15 minute no-obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
Restaurant Yield Management is a key tactic for profitable Restaurants.
We discuss real-life examples that are easy to implement in your Restaurant so that you can increase profitability for your Restaurant.
Don't forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you're missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15 minute no-obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
Marketing for a Restaurant is often the missing ingredient for Restaurants. This is Part 2 of our series on why Restaurant Marketing is so important for Restaurant owners.
These days have the best food is no where near enough to be successful. Remember - you don't want to have the best Restaurant that no one has ever heard of. Have a listen for our reasons for Restaurant marketing and see if there is something that you are missing.
Don't forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you're missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15 minute no-obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
Marketing for a Restaurant is often the missing ingredient for Restaurants. We look at the 7 Reasons that successful Restaurant operators market their Restaurants. (Hint: It is certainly not just to get more customers!)
Don't forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you're missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15 minute no-obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
We continue our look at 10 (+) free and easy to use Marketing tools in your Restaurant.
Don't forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you're missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15 minute no-obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
Restolo - the Restaurant OnLine Ordering system is going nuts. Low commission to help you increase profitability in your online ordering business.
We discuss where Restaurant OnLine Ordering systems are at today and where we think they are headed.
This episode discusses 10 free and easy tools you should be using to drive your Restaurant profitability. Even if you aren't doing the restaurant marketing yourself, you need to know about these tools so that you know your outsourced marketing company knows what it is doing.
Don't forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you're missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15 minute no-obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
This podcast episode follows on from our Restaurant Value Engineering series.
We discuss where Restaurant OnLine Ordering systems are at today and where we think they are headed.
Do forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you're missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15 minute no obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
This is the fourth episode in our Restaurant Value Engineering podcast series.
We look at real-world examples to help you increase the profitability of your Restaurant.
Do forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you're missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15 minute no obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
This is the third episode in our Restaurant Value Engineering podcast series.
We look at real world examples to help you increase the profitability of your Restaurant.
Do forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you're missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15 minute no obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
This is the second episode in our Restaurant Value Engineering podcast series.
We take a deep dive on a great marketing and business idea that was well executed by KFC Japan and break it down using the lens of Restaurant Value Engineering.
Do forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you're missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15 minute no obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
We discuss the concept of Restaurant Value Engineering.
What is it?
Why do it?
What are examples of Restaurant Value Engineering?
How can it help you increase the profitability of your Restaurant?
Check out the show notes for the podcast where you'll find more details on this weeks episode.
Do forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you're missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15 minute no obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
This is Part 3 of our Resto Trends 2021 series. Check out Episode 1 of our Restaurant Trends for 20201 series if you missed it.
2020 has been a year that has been very different to what we expected.
We discuss the food, marketing and business trends for your Restaurant in 2021.
Do forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you're missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15 minute no obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
This is Part 2 of our Resto Trends 2021 episode. Check out Episode 1 of our Restaurant Trends for 20201 series if you missed it.
This episode talks about the changes in the online ordering and delivery space and how Restaurants will work to increase profitability in a very dynamic space.
Do forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you're missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15 minute no obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
We look at how COVID-19 has impacted the Restaurant Industry and how you can position yourself in 2021 to survive, revive and maybe even thrive in what has been for most Restaurants around the world, a truly awful year.
Don't worry - there are some things to be hopeful about.
Do forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you're missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15 minute no obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
Our last episode was part one of our look at Restaurant USPs. . Have a listen for some great tips on how a Restaurant USP can increase your profitability.
This week we look at lessons for Restaurant Owners from the closure of Sizzler Australia. A sad development for staff and customers. Collins Foods Limited have talked about the effects of COVID-19, which obviously had a huge impact, but there are more issues that I think we can all learn from.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=3660089340719057
This was also done as a Facebook video show you can see what we are talking about. Check out the video, or listen to the podcast and let us know what you think.
Check out our free restaurant online ordering system. It's free, integrates with Stripe and notifies you on mobile, PC, email and Epson TM-82 docket printer. We are giving it away free to help you survive through the Corona Crisis.
Have a listen to the podcast and see what a restaurant USP can you grow your business.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
Our last episode was part one of our look at Restaurant USPs. . Have a listen for some great tips on how a Restaurant USP can increase your profitability.
This episode looks at Restaurant Unique Selling Propositions examples and how to create one.
Check out our free restaurant online ordering system. It's free, integrates with Stripe and notifies you on mobile, PC, email and Epson TM-82 docket printer. We are giving it away free to help you survive through the Corona Crisis.
Have a listen to the podcast and see what a restaurant USP can you grow your business.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
Our last episode looked at how to plan to reopen your Restaurant with the new COVID-19 normal. Have a listen for some great tips to help you survive the coronapocalypse.
This episode looks at Restaurant Unique Selling Propositions. What are they, why are they important and what they can do for your Restaurant.
Check out our free restaurant online ordering system. It's free, integrates with Stripe and notifies you on mobile, PC, email and Epson TM-82 docket printer. We are giving it away free to help you survive through the Corona Crisis.
To help you through the crisis, we have our Free Restaurant Tools, and if you need more help, contact the team about our special marketing assistance program during the Coronavirus outbreak. FROLO signups have jumped up quite a lot as Restaurants look to go to delivery or pickup only.
Have a listen to the podcast and see what concepts Restaurants have been dealing with this week.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
Our last episode looked at how to build a Restaurant Take Out Business to survive COVID-19. This has been one of our most popular episodes!
This episode looks at some of the smart ideas we've seen from Restaurants as they prepare to reopen to the new normal in the COVID-19 world.
Check out our free restaurant online ordering system. It's free, integrates with Stripe and notifies you on mobile, PC, email and Epson TM-82 docket printer. We are giving it away free to help you survive through the Corona Crisis.
To help you through the crisis, we have our Free Restaurant Tools, and if you need more help, contact the team about our special marketing assistance program during the Coronavirus outbreak. FROLO signups have jumped up quite a lot as Restaurants look to go to delivery or pickup only.
Have a listen to the podcast and see what concepts Restaurants have been dealing with this week.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
Our last episode looked at how to build a Restaurant Take Out Business to survive COVID-19. This has been one of our most popular episodes!
Today we talk about some of the things you need to think about as you start to reopen your Restaurant. It is going to be tough and very much survival of the fittest, so have a listen to the podcast and think about some of the ideas.
Check out our free restaurant online ordering system. It's free, integrates with Stripe and notifies you on mobile, PC, email and Epson TM-82 docket printer. We are giving it away free to help you survive through the Corona Crisis.
To help you through the crisis, we have our Free Restaurant Tools, and if you need more help, contact the team about our special marketing assistance program during the Coronavirus outbreak. FROLO signups have jumped up quite a lot as Restaurants look to go to delivery or pickup only.
Have a listen to the podcast and see what concepts Restaurants have been dealing with this week.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
The last episode looks at leadership, runway and reengineering your Restaurant to survive the next 8 - 12 weeks.
Today we discuss how to build a sustainable take out business to survive.
Check out our free restaurant online ordering system. It's free, integrates with Stripe and notifies you on mobile, PC, email and Epson TM-82 docket printer. We are giving it away free to help you survive through the Corona Crisis.
To help you through the crisis, we have our Free Restaurant Tools, and if you need more help, contact the team about our special marketing assistance program during the Coronavirus outbreak. FROLO signups have jumped up quite a lot as Restaurants look to go to delivery or pickup only.
Have a listen to the podcast and see what concepts Restaurants have been dealing with this week.
Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.
Last episode covered what we are seeing working in quick and dirty Restaurant Marketing.
Today we discuss some key concepts as we move into lockdowns and shutdowns.
Runway. Cash going out vs cash coming in.
Re engineering your Restaurant to bring in cash from different areas. Some great things that Restaurants are doing.
Restaurant Leadership.
To help you through the crisis, we have our Free Restaurant Tools, and if you need more help, contact the team about our special marketing assistance program during the Coronavirus outbreak. FROLO signups have jumped up quite a lot as Restaurants look to go to delivery or pickup only.
Have a listen to the podcast and see what concepts Restaurants have been dealing with this week.
Let us know what you thought of the podcast on Linkedin or Facebook.
Last week we discussed some tactics to help your Restaurant survive the COVID19 virus.
This week we discuss quick and dirty (that means free / cheap and easy to run) marketing ideas to help you get through the damn Coronavirus crisis.
To help you through the crisis, we have our Free Restaurant Tools, and if you need more help, contact the team about our special marketing assistance program during the Coronavirus outbreak.
Have a listen to the podcast and do some marketing to get those customers in.
Let us know what you thought of the podcast on Linkedin or Facebook.
Last week's episode looked at some great Easter marketing ideas for your Restaurant.
This week we cover off on a plan to help you manage the impact of the Coronavirus / COVID 19 on your Restaurant. These are some of the ideas that we have been discussing with our customers and some are making a big difference in cash flow, so please have a listen.
Let us know what you thought of the podcast on Linkedin or Facebook.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
Did you listen to our episode on Al Desko Dining? It could be a good little revenue stream and a new product for new customers in your Restaurant!
Last weeks episode looked at the trend of Al desko dining. What is it and how can you profit from it? We've got a 7 step guide.
This week we go through how we created some cool ideas for Easter. These are Easter ideas, but the process will work for any holiday or event that you have coming up.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
Last episode we looked at Restaurant Profitability for 2020. For many it is going to be a tough year and we've listed what we see as working for a lot of Restaurants.
These weeks episode looks at the trend of Al desko dining. What is it and how can you profit from it? We've got a 7 step guide.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
After looking at the Restaurant Trends, we discuss what tricks you can use in your Restaurant in 2020 to improve profitability.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
This is Part II of our Restaurant Trends 2020 podcast. Listen to the first episode to get all of the Restaurant Tech and Food trends for 2020.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
We've collated lots of research to determine the big trends for 2020 in the Restaurant industry.
We discuss products like Zero Foods Black Rice Toastie. For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
This is Part 5 of our Menu Engineering series, looking at our 7step process for building great menus. This episode discusses the final steps for writing the perfect menu.
If you are looking for tips on writing a great menu for your Restaurant, this is a great place to start.
If you missed earlier episodes, check out the BCG Matrix for Restaurant Profitability.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
We've look at Restaurant Culture in the past with Carrie Luxem.
This episode looks at how we can be better leaders in our companies with some great tips for you to be a better leader.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
This is a continuation of our 7 step guide to Restaurant Menu Engineering.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
This is a continuation of our 7 step guide to Restaurant Menu Engineering.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
Some of Yelp's business practices are very damaging to Small Businesses and goes against the core mission of helping consumers to find great small businesses.
We talk to Kaylie Milliken about Yelp and her documentary, Billion Dollar Bully.
If you haven't seen Billion Dollar Bully, check it out to really understand the impact on small businesses around the world.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
We've talked about Restaurant Creativity and Innovation and we've been working with a lot of creative chefs and innovative Restaurant owners.
Here is a model that we are developing to help restaurant owners and chefs be more creative and innovate more. It is difficult, but our framework gives you clear examples and some strategies for creativity and innovation that should help you increase the profitability of your Restaurant.
Listen to the podcast and visit the website for more information on Restaurant Creativity and Innnovation
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
We look at Menu Engineering and how it can be applied in a small Restaurant. We show you the easy tips you can use to increase revenue with your menu, and more importantly, how to increase profit with our 7 step process to Menu Engineering.
Listen to the podcast and visit the website for more information on Menu Engineering.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
This episode of Secret Sauce, the Restaurant Marketing Podcast looks at influencer marketing.
Who are the influencers, what can they do for your Restaurant and should you use them? We discuss this hot topic.
Please check out our show notes for more information about Influencer Marketing and how you can use it better in your Restaurant.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
We cover an example of innovation you can use with your menu.
What is your website doing for you? We saw a Restaurant who had their traffic fall 75% after moving from our platform to a different website provider. Not all websites are made the same - and this fall in web traffic has translated into a LOT less bums on seats. It is crushing to think that a chef is wondering what is wrong with his food, when it was a decision made by their marketing team that has destroyed his restaurant's profitability.
We look at the recent spate of Restaurant closings in Sydney.
We look at the reasons.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
We talk about what you can learn from visiting a Trade Show like Foodservice Australia 2019.
Too many Restaurants don't think about how they need to be innovating to keep ahead of the competition. A great way to do this is to head to a trade show and talk to the vendors and other Restaurant owners about what is happening in the industry.
We discuss -
Organic Hemp Kombucha from Happy Hippy Drinks,
True Foods and their activated charcoal wraps
Italforni Pesaro's 90 second Pizza oven.
These are just some of the examples of ways that you can innovate in your Restaurant.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
This is Part 2 of our Restaurant KPIs and Restaurant Metrics podcasts, detailing the kind
We discuss cash flow tracking and influencing.
Rent / Hour.
Fixed Costs / Hour.
These 2 metrics are often not considered in the Restaurant Business plan.
Make sure you check out the show notes, or download the podcast, we have a lot more info on Restaurant Metrics jam packed into this profitable hospitality business podcast.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
Your restaurant's performance is bounded by it's performance across a range of Key Performance Indicators, but many restaurants don't bother to look at these numbers.
We have 8 monitors that generate automatic data for our business so that everyone can see how the team is performing. We discuss 7 groups of KPIs that are critical to running a successful restaurant.
We discuss some easy ways to collect and analyse these KPIs and improve your restaurant business.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
We've discussed myths before, particularly marketing myths in Episode 64 and Episode 65 - Restaurant Marketing Myths.
This episode covers the Restaurant Myths that we see that are causing financial damage to so many Restaurants and some of these are killing Restaurants.
Have a listen and see if you are falling for one of these myths.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
If you interested in cutting Restaurant costs, check out our Free Tools. We talk about just how much people are saving with these ways of cutting Restaurant costs.
We look at the myths about the kind of food that you have in the restaurant, and how great food just doesn't speak for itself.
It's the economy stupid - no, often it isn't. There might be fundamental issues with your Restaurant that you need to fix.
Everyone will love my Restaurant - no they won't. And try to appeal to everyone is a great way to have an average Restaurant.
You can't create a great culture in a Restaurant. Wrong, there are lots of ways that you can do it. Check out Nick Sarillo and Carrie Luxem, they are experts in building great Restaurant cultures.
9 (yes number 9 in our list of the Top 7 Restaurant Myths :) ). You can't make money in Restaurants. Yes you can, you need a plan, a great team, some great products and you need to execute on it.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
We have more details on what we cover in the show notes.
We split the venue into different parts:
- Food
- Drinks
- Events
And discuss some bespoke marketing ideas for each of them, and then combining them for a better result.
Have a listen for our tried and true methods of increasing large venue patron numbers.
Links mentioned in the podcast:
Creating an Annual Restaurant Marketing Plan.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
We discuss one customer who increased his prices by 30% for UberEats customers. His REVENUE stayed the same, (so he lost 30% of orders). This means that he is now shipping each order at a price that makes sense for him. Many Restaurants are turning to Pick up only services powered through their own website, using FROLO, the Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering system to take orders without commission and offering a pickup and save campaign.
Looking for ideas on how to find new customers and turn them into repeat customers. Lots of tricks for Pubs, Clubs, Hotels and Bar marketing that can make a big difference in revenue and profitability.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
We discuss who you can create a template for a marketing campaign based on the Lamington Cake restaurant marketing campaign that we discussed a few episodes ago.
Links mentioned in this podcast.
We discuss the campaign by Dinner by Heston.
We look at some of the ideas we mentioned in the online ordering podcasts.
Here is the Restaurant Creativity and Innovation podcast.
How to create an Annual Restaurant Marketing plan.
Some great ideas for How to get Great Restaurant Photos.
These are the resources mentioned. To see what we discussed in this podcast, visit the Podcast Show Notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
We continue on with our discussion on increasing profitability with online ordering.
We look at decreasing costs with companies like Menulog, Just Eat, Grub Hub, Uber Eats and Deliveroo.
Should you use UberEats or Deliveroo? Which one is better for your Restaurant?
What is the long term prospects for Menulog? We discuss where we think this will go.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
We discuss packaging, kitchen throughput, pickup only and differential pricing.
For the details of what is discussed in this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
This episode has an example of a great Restaurant Marketing campaign from the talented marketing team at Dinner by Heston. We break down the process that they used and more importantly the way that you can replicate their success. Check out the show notes which have a lot more detail on the episode and the example of the marketing campaign.
We break down the new Lamington Cake marketing campaign, looking at the steps they took in this great marketing campaign and how you can do this in your Restaurant.
Disclaimer - these guys aren't customers of ours, we are just fans of their food, their team, their Restaurant USP and their marketing!
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
This is the 3rd in our SEO series for Restaurant Websites. If you missed the first one, have a listen to it first, as this podcast builds on the first and second episodes in the Restaurant SEO series.
Check out the Show Notes for this podcast. This Restaurant SEO Series is designed to help you do your own SEO or at least work out if the marketing company you are dealing with knows anything about Restaurant SEO. If your looking for help, you can always talk to the Restaurant Marketing Experts! :) We would love to hear from you!
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
Check out last weeks episode and our Google Analytics podcast to help you get the basics for Restaurant SEO.
We continue on with some of the tricks that SEO companies use, like monthly SEO contracts. The main thing that a lot of Restaurant Marketing companies do is send through reports, especially SEO reports, many of which are automatically generated.
What platform is best for your website SEO?
We discuss some of the tools that you can use to make the SEO better. Remember, we are now talking about technical SEO, not the business SEO. Wordpress tends to be a lot better for SEO because of some of the tools that are available. A great example if Yoast SEO, which is pretty much the industry standard for SEO tools in Wordpress. The more often you create content, the more you need to think about SEO tools.
Make sure your Website is secure.
Google has made a commitment to try and make sure the internet is safer for people using the internet. One of the ways that businesses can make the web more secure is to make sure that there is a Security certificate installed on the website. This means that communication between the browser and the website is encrypted and ensure. This is pretty easy to do, but there are still a lot of websites that aren’t optimised.
Is your Restaurant website mobile optimised?
This is really important because the number of people browsing your site from a mobile is increasing all the time. Google has a quick and easy tool to help you find out if the website is mobile friendly –https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly.
How fast is your Restaurant Website?
Speed is a big factor for Restaurant websites. How quickly does each of the pages load? People on a mobile often are on networks with slower downloads, and they often leave a page if it is taking too long to render, so check the page speed of your website. Here is a Google tool to help you with this and the report has some things that you can look at to increase the speed of your website.
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
A lot of the information is quite technical but it is a great tool to tell you if you have issues and see if you need to talk to your web developer. This report will also give you some tips to increase you websites page speed.
Stay tuned for part 2 of our Top 10 Tips for Restaurant Website SEO.
We talk about why it is super important for all Restaurant owners to take a holiday and some of the tips that we used to take our big Christmas holidays.
We talk about the differences between business and technical SEO. We discuss the technical SEO tips that you need to be thinking about for Search Engine Optimisation for your Restaurant Website.
The first tip is to review any contracts you have for SEO. A lot of people spend a lot of money on SEO without any real results from their efforts.
We discuss the data that we are seeing for Restaurant websites and we discuss the Return on Investment for individual pages. We like to focus on the individual ROI for each page on your website. The ROI can be very high for niches that you are ranking for. The SEO is all about getting those customers in for the first time. There are other techniques to get them to come back.
We discuss a multi niche strategy which can really help you increase the number of visitors to your website. We discuss the average number of visitors to your website. Some people don't know how many visitors they get and some are shocked at the actual average number of Restaurant visitors.
We look at Corporate Events as a part of your SEO and why it is important to look at what you are trying to focus on with SEO. Don't fall for what we call the 'electrified banana' effect. This is where an SEO company will shape you towards keywords that are easy for them to rank for, not what is going to make money for you.
We discuss some of the tricks that are used in the SEO industry so that you can have a better discussion with them about what YOU want. (Obviously, we do Restaurant SEO, so maybe you should take to us. :) )
One of the SEO traps you need to watch out for is if you are being brandjacked. Restaurant Brandjacking can decrease the effectiveness of your SEO and increase the cost to acquire a customer AND decrease the numbers in your Restaurant CRM.
How did you go with the Restaurant Trends podcasts, looking at the trends that we see as being important in 2019?
We look at the Restaurant Customer Loyalty Graph in this podcast and how you can drive customers to the right, increasing the value of your average customer in the process.
We are now presenting a new view so that customers can see how customer loyalty is evolving over time to have a time based view of customer loyalty. This is built into FROLO and FORBS, providing a great way for you to see how your customers are becoming repeat customers.
Repeat restaurant customers are really important because it increases the average Long Term Customer Value for your Restaurant.
Our demo of the Restaurant Customer Loyalty Graph shows how customers become worth more to your Restaurant as they order or book more often.
We discuss how your Long Term Customer value graph can show you the success or lack thereof of turning new customers into repeat customers and why for some Restaurants this isn't a problem, but for others it is.
Your customer loyalty graph can increase the value of your Restaurant when you look to sell it.
Identifying loyal customers is really important creating great experiences for your high value customers.
Loyalty coupons, such as in FROLO, can dramatically increase customer loyalty. The loyalty coupons drive customers to order again, especially as the customer gets closer to their free meal.
Email marketing is a great tool for increasing LTCV for your Restaurant customers.
Facebook retargetting is a really powerful way to re engage with customers.
Are you using the Facebook pixel? This is a very powerful retargeting tool that works well across website visitors and visitors to a certain page.
What is your process around special events? This are a great way to give existing customers a reason to come back and can be married up with a call to action towards new customers in the niche that you are targetting with your special event.
Driving customer behaviour with repeat visits can form habits and customers with a weekly habit are among the most valuable customers for a Restaurant.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
Beverages are part of the megatrend towards healthier options that an increasing number of people are going to be looking for. Fermented drinks like Kombucha are going to be increasingly popular, with 5x the number of people looking for Kombucha now than 5 years ago.
We discuss where you want to sit in the product adoption cycle / trend uptake and whether you want to be doing the heavy lifting in educating your customers.
We discuss bugs - are they going to be a trend with bugs? Possibly not. A lot of people are talking about it, but there is still a lot to do with customer education to make it acceptable and there is also a lot of work to be done with the supply chain for it to become economically sustainable.
Delivery + Take Home. Pizza delivery has been done, probably since the 1950s. Deliveroo wants to see a dramatic uptake in breakfast and lunch deliveries and will be looking to charge 35% commission. Breakfast will probably be hard work to find people looking to order their breakfast for delivery. We discuss the options for Restaurants as there is a slowly increasing number of customers looking to eat in their own home. There are options for Restaurants rather than signing up for Deliveroo / UberEats / Delivery Hero / Grub Hub. Check out the Free Restaurant Online Ordering system. Maybe try a pick up only system, do your own deliveries, or try some of the other combinations. We discuss the genius in the Dominos Pizza delivery system and the delivery fees that Dominos charge. We think that these are some of the smartest guys in the delivery game, and you can use some of their tricks.
Innovation - this is becoming an increasingly hot topic. More Restaurants are searching for ideas on Restaurant Innovation, in fact our podcast on Restaurant Innovation is one of our most popular episodes. Whether it is in the menu, the business model, the site, the team, there are a lot of strategies that Restaurants are becoming increasingly interested in to help differentiate themselves.
Niching down - more Restaurants are creating bespoke niche plans across multiple niches in their Restaurants. We discuss some ideas like your Whiskey drinks list.
Marketing - there will be a lot more Restaurants that are going to create a real marketing plan. Using the data that they have from their online ordering system or booking system and trying to target and retarget as many customers as possible. More restaurants will be looking at ways to move their customers to the right on the customer loyalty graph.
The number 1 trend for the Restaurants - well, you will have to listen to the podcast. :) Seriously though, this is really important and it is a really common mistake that we see time and time again and it really is detrimental if you aren't focusing on this trend. People who follow this, restaurants who build this into their business, they are much more likely to be successful.
We talk about the search for General Tsao's Chicken. If you haven't seen the Netflix documentary, check it out - it is a great example of menu engineering and adapting a cuisine to a market.
Cricket OJ + Yoghurt smoothies. Yes, we talk about Crickets and OJ smoothies.
Have a glorious 2019!
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
We have created our list of the trends that will be impacting (increasing or decreasing) profitability. This is based on our conversations with our Restaurant customers across 17 countries along with some Google search trends analysis, plus our reading of the
We talk about the impact of being behind the trends, with the example of the Melbourne Burger Wars. We discuss the winners, places like 8 bit, Huxtaburger and Easy's.
We start by discussing Google Search Trends and what you can learn from it and more importantly, how you can use it in building your marketing and business plan. This can help with your specials and your menu board.
We talk about wages in Restaurants. Restaurants are looking at the product that they have, so that they can decrease the skills requirements, looking at roster costs.
Openings - there will be a lot more openings this year. As the pressure increases in the industry, there are more experts looking to take advantage of the opportunities that are coming up in the industry. These opportunities are coming about through the leasing deals that are on offer.
The food trends themselves are something that a lot of Restaurant owners chase, but I don't think it is as important as many people think. The ability to authentically and passionately relate to a type of food or method of cooking is not something that can be changed each year to chase the new trends and it confuses customers.
Beverages- coffee, tea, fruit drinks. There is a lot of opportunity around beverages, as a source of income and as a way to increase the gross customer spend.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
This is part 2 of what we've learnt in producing the first 100 episodes of Secret Sauce.
5. We continue with a discussion about Creativity and Innovation. This is something that we are seeing a lot more restaurants starting to focus on. We look at food combining and some other techniques that you can use be work on your creativity. We also discuss innovation and what it means in your Restaurant.
We discuss how you should embrace failure in your Restaurant. It is a fundamental part of the innovation and creativity process.
6. We discuss how you should be thinking about your customer contact details as a part of your Restaurant Marketing plan. Having a plan is really important and something that probably all successful Restaurants have. There is a lot of information that you should be collecting and using to turn your new customers into repeat customers. We look at the importance of the marketing plan and how you can create an annual restaurant marketing plan. Planning makes execution a lot easier, because you will have the time that you need to plan for each of your marketing campaigns. This is really important, especially if you are planning on creating special dishes as a part of your campaign. We discuss the role that Red Robin's Ramen Burger campaign played in the revenue increase that they saw.
7. There is a lot of information that you should be collecting and using to turn your new customers into repeat customers. We talk about using Facebook ads as a part of the research for your marketing plan. You can run ads to see whether customers will be interested in a product or concept. This is a really cheap way to do market research.
8. Who are your customers? Do you really know who they are?
9. We discuss the art of tying all of this together. It creates a much higher level of complexity that people need to be thinking about, but in putting it all together, you will decrease the cost to acquire a customer.
We talk about how Restaurants can get help with implementing a Restaurant Marketing plan.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
We review what we have learnt are the most important things in Restaurant Marketing.
Thank so much to all of our listeners. The response to Secret Sauce has been truly amazing and we have learnt so much in producing it for everyone.
We review our Top 5 podcasts of all time - these are the ones that have been downloaded the most and that people continue to download today.
Our Top 5 podcasts of all time are:
39 - The Secret of Restaurant Profitability - New ways to look at Restaurant revenue and profitability.
1: 8 ways to make your Restaurant busy on a Tuesday night
20 - Your 90 Day Restaurant Marketing Plan before you open your Restaurant
37 - Restaurant Innovation and Creativity
40 - Restaurant Leadership - Steps to help you be a better leader in your Restaurant
Technology: Mobile Phones for photography and marketing, POS machines, IP Cameras, online ordering and bookings management systems, hiring and managing your, and your staff.
Team: Your team is a really important part of the product in your Restaurant. We talk about the experience we had at 7 grams. It is a great story of how building a great team is so important.
Your Story: What is your Restaurant's story and how do you tell your story? Is it included in Step 0 of the SEO process? How do you niche down your story?
Your Menu: Costing a menu that contains epic dishes that draw customers in is the underpinning of a strong and successful marketing plan.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
We look at how you can improve your Linkedin Profile. This is something that you want to do before you start actively posting, because people will start looking at your profile and you want to have the best profile possible.
The next step is to start building your Linkedin network. Who should you connect with and who should you avoid?
How can you increase the success rate with the connection requests that you send?
What is the importance of having over 500 connections? Why is this an important metric?
How much time should you spend in Linkedin?
We look at how Linkedin works for Corporate events. This can be a real sweet spot, with businesses looking to do Corporate events. These are less price sensitive and generally run events midweek, which can be really profitable for a restaurant.
We look at building multi-channel marketing strategies with Linkedin as one of those channels.
Are you a Restaurant Thought Leader?
We then discuss what you should be posting up on Linkedin.
Creating posts that demonstrate your knowledge and your skill is really important. Videos, of course, are a big opportunity as well. The better the post, the more engagement you will have. Tag people into the post. Show of your skills and your knowledge, or share news from the industry with your take on it.
The feedback that you get from the Analytics in Linkedin gives you a really good idea about what is with your audience.
We finish with a really cool trick that you can use in Linkedin. Have a listen. Not a lot of people know about it and it can be a real game changer!
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
We talk about really hot Chicken Vindaloos!
A great little Indian Restaurant with a really hot Vindaloo. This is a key differentiator for them in the local market and we look at how they have a pretty unusual menu for a traditional Indian Restaurant. They have a few mini platters, making it easier to upsell customers to a higher average sale value.
We talk about why you should be thinking about Linkedin Marketing and we also talk about a way that you can create a Linkedin Marketing process that is quick and simple to do so that you aren't spending too much time on yet another Social Media platform.
We discuss how you can use Linkedin to help with building your personal brand, it can help with hiring, corporate hospitality, finding partners that you can do joint marketing, and staying up to date, networking. It can also help with getting customer feedback.
There are half a trillion impressions per year on Linkedin, but only 3 million are sharing content, so there is a lot of impressions going to a small number of users. This creates a big opportunity for those who can create the content.
Make sure that you set some time to have a look at your profile because you want to get your profile right before you start driving people to your profile.
How can you make sure that your profile is set up for success? There are some things to think about to create the best possible profile to help you be successful.
We discuss the reasons why Linkedin is worthwhile to use. There are 500 million people on Linkedin!
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
We discuss (quickly) the power of Linkedin and how it can help you with your Restaurant. Check out my profile and connect with me to keep up to date with the best tips for Restaurant marketing. :)
We then continue our series of podcasts on how to get great images for your Restaurant.
Photography is a great way for you to show your creativity, your food and your Restaurant so it is worth the effort to get some of the great images that you need for epic marketing.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
We celebrate new customers in France and Cyprus!
We discuss GoPros and their use in your Restaurant and the kind of video that you can create with a GoPro.
What are the types of images that you need to produce for your Restaurant Marketing?
There is a process that you can take to get the kind of images that will help you convert better from prospects to customers and customers to repeat customers. What are the photos that you need?
Who is in your value chain and what part can they play in your marketing?
What is your role in the Restaurant? What role can you play in marketing? Should there be photos of you in your Restaurant? Sometimes it is important not to be in the marketing of your own Restaurant. We talk about those situations.
Do you market your team? Are they in your Restaurant photos? Team photos can have a big impact on the restaurant and we discuss the benefits you can have in sharing images of your team.
Photos can really tell 1,000 words and in your marketing plan those 1,000 words can be really valuable, so getting photos of the right kinds of images is really important.
Why are photos of Restaurant important and what is the number 1 problem with most common Restaurant interior photos? We talk about derisking transactions. This is something that a photo can do really well and can be very important in improving your conversion rates. People want to avoid conflict so they are often unlikely to bear any risk as to what the experience is that you are offering. Photos can really help with that.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
Customers first eat with their eyes, so the photos that you use on Facebook, Instagram, and your website are really important when you are trying to convert prospects into customers.
Before we get started with Restaurant Photography, we look at a little bit of marketing innovation that is working really well for one of our customers.
We look at how you can get the images that you need for your Restaurant marketing.
We talk about Professional Photographers and the best way that you can structure a brief for your photographer. How can you get the best value from your photographer and what tips are there for the kind of photos that you need?
Not everyone has the budget for a professional photographer, so what are the alternatives? We have some great ideas around how you can get some great photos on the cheap.
How can you drive your customers to take photos of your food and of your Restaurant? User Generated Content from your customers is a great way that you can increase the amount and strength of the word of mouth that you can get from your customers.
What about your staff? What is their role in the photography part of your marketing plan?
We discuss what types of cameras that you can use. Should you use a Digital SLR, a compact, a phone camera?
Make sure that you have the photos that truly represent your passion and your food. We've seen websites that have photos that I think actively decrease the chances that a prospect will come into your Restaurant. You don't want to be one of those Restaurants.
Photos help tell your story and that story is a big part of why new customers will come into your Restaurant.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page. We discuss the merits of mobile phones and the photos that they can take in your Restaurant. Food photos with modern mobile phones can be a really quick and powerful way of getting the photos that you need of your food, your team, your customers and your Restaurant.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
We start out by talking about Adriano Zumbo's Patisserie, which went into administration. We look at this as an example of how you need to be careful about your Instagram marketing. It is hard to get people out of Instagram and even harder to create revenue from it, so we look at some ways that you improve the profitability of your Instagram marketing.
Adriano even sold his house, possibly to try and keep the Restaurant business going, so this is a real tragedy. Was it related to Fancy Nance? Could the concept have been better tested with a popup?
Are you selling Restaurant Gift Certificates?
Should you?
Does your GC system feed into your CRM?
We look at how important it is to identify your high value gift certificate customers.
Gift Certificates can be a great way to improve the cash flow of your Restaurant.
What is the breakage rate of your Restaurant Gift Certificates? Not every Certificate gets redeemed. This is added profitability for your Restaurant. Too high and you could be creating upset customers, but there is a definite opportunity to improve margins.
There are 2 customers in every Restaurant Gift Certifcate transaction, the buyer and the recipient. This transaction gives you 2 contact details, which is why your CRM system is so important.
Restaurant Gift Certificates are a great way of increasing brand awareness for your Restaurant because it creates locked in customers.
We also discuss product extension and inflation, both good reasons to be using Gift Certificates in your Restaurant.
And finally, don't forget the upsell opportunity.
So now that you fully understand Restaurant Gift Certificates, sign up for our Free Restaurant Gift Certificate system. It does everything you need, even taking the payment for you.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
We discuss the Just Eat half year results. Our advice is always to try and negotiate on the rates that they charge. There can be a big variation between the commissions that they charge different restaurants - so negotiate and see how much you can save. (Or you can get Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering with FROLO) :)
This episode covers People and Processes so that you can take a holiday.
People.
We've talked to some experts on Restaurant hiring and culture, like Nick Sarillo from Nick's Pizza and Pub in Chicago and Carrie Luxem, from Restaurant HR Group, about how to hire right for your company and how to retain great people. Getting the hiring right is a big part of building a strong team and a strong team is a team that can function when you are away on your holiday.
Process
The last P in the 3Ps of taking a holiday is process. How do you do everything in your Restaurant? Clear communication about what the job entails and how it needs to be done.
We look at a couple of examples around how process can make a big difference in your business and how it can build trust into your business. Too many businesses don't do inventory and they are afraid to leave the business because they are worried that too much stock will walk out the door if they aren't there.
Too many restaurants are only open when the owner is physical in the Restaurant. If you had great processes, you can then open longer, which can dramatically increase profitability. Have a listen to this because it can make a big difference.
Some tech we use are Slack and Zoom. This helps our teams communicate. Confluence is a great tool to keep all of your procedures. This is great for recipes and for all of your opening and closing routine procedures. IP cameras are a great way to provide a powerful tool to help with trust. It is good to be able to review the video for instances when a customer claims a hair is in their soup, or someone working the till, or the staff member that doesn't do any work.
Helping Restaurant owners take a holiday is a big thing for us, so if you've used any of our tips or tools to take a holiday, please send us a photo!
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
As a restaurant owner, when did you last take a holiday? We is your next holiday planned for? Do you have a holiday planned?
Too many Restuarant owners aren't able to take even a short holiday from their Restaurant and I think that is really sad. It leads to burn out and people falling out of love with their Restaurant and if you don't love working in your Restaurant, how can you expect your employees to love coming to work, and when no one loves coming to work, your customers aren't going to love coming in to eat.
We talk about Foodora leaving Australia. There was no surprise here, especially with their 2 court cases coming up in Australia. There has been a big backlash from Restaurants struggling with profitability and from customers as well.
We talk about some of the tricks that Restaurants are using when they are using Deliveroo or UberEats to retain some profitability.
The look at the 3Ps of Restaurant Holidays.
- Profits - you need profits to pay your wage and the costs to go on holiday!
- People - Great people make it a lot easier to get away.
- Processes - Great processes makes it easier for people to do what they need to do the way that you want it.
Burn out is a real risk in running a Restaurant. There is a lot of horror involved in running a Restaurant. There is customers, suppliers, reviews, staff. A lot of these things can create a lot of pressure for you and without a break you can end up burning out.
Too many people run marginal businesses without decent profit. Nothing is going to change if you aren't going to change. If your Restaurant is marginal, then you need to do something new, you need to change the business to make it profitable.
A successful business is a business that gives you a good return for the work you put in. If the business plan won't work you need to change the business plan and if you aren't getting the number of customers, then you need to change your marketing plan.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
Knowing what is going on with your website is an important ingredient in your Restaurant's Secret Sauce.
We look at bounce rates and then we move onto the dark arts of Restaurant Marketing - campaign tagging with the Google Analytics campaign builder. This is really important because it helps you keep your marketing accountable.
Website speed and page load time is a really important part of the SEO for your site. This is more important for mobiles and most Restaurant customers are on mobile. Check the speed with the Google PageSpeed Insights page.
What are the 2 types of customers who will be using Google and how do you treat each of them?
What can you discover from the Behaviour and site content pages? There is a lot of information that you can find here and some of it is very important.
We finish with the Secret to Restaurant SEO. This is what most SEO companies don't want you to know, we share it with you so that you can come up with a great SEO plan to increase web traffic, increase customers, increase revenue, increase profits and then decrease the number of hours that you are working in your Restaurant.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
We talk about our Platform, which give our customers comparative analytics, so that you can know how you are doing compared to other Restaurants. This can be a big competitive advantage over Restaurants not getting this information.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
Did you check out the episode on how to fly like a celebrity chef? The good news is that I have been practising what I preach and I've been lucky enough to make Platinum with Qantas. There has been a bit of travelling around the world, visiting Restaurants and being Platinum certainly makes things a lot nicer. How can you craete a loyalty program that makes your regularly customers feel really special?
We go through each of the tabs on Google Analytics about the key metrics in Google Analytics. This will help you to understand how people are finding your website and also give you the insights to improve it. This is the most important part that you want to be thinking about.
If you don't have Google Analytics, here is a link for how to set up your Google Analytics account.
We go through each of the key metrics and what you can learn from the metrics and how each one of them fits into the Restaurant marketing process. Not only what does each of the metrics mean, but how you can increase them. Generally, hopefully, more traffic to your website means more customers in your Restaurant.
How many people are coming to your website on a mobile? Is it mobile optimized? If not you might be missing out on many of the new customers that you need, especially if you are in a tourist area.
The Audience tab gives you insights into who your customers are and what they are doing. Male vs Female and age group information can also be found.
What are the differing sales techniques that you need to use for new vs returning customers?
Many small Restaurants use Credit Cards to pay for a lot of bills. With some really simple changes, you can make a really big difference in the kind of travel that you can take.
We talk to Steve Hui from I Fly Flat. This is something that we do a pretty good job of, and I was able to get an upgrade to Business Class last year for our family as we flew from Melbourne to Singapore in December last year. This was an Epic experience flying Business Class with Qantas.
Steve discusses a range of tactics that you can use fly in style around the world, just by changing some purchasing habits and maybe just even changing your credit cards.
Travel is a really important part of life, I think. Experiencing different places, different cultures.
To pick the right card, you want to match it to your suppliers. We talk credit card surcharges and some ways that you can negotiate down the credit card surcharge with some of your suppliers.
Not many small business owners are doing this, but it can be a great way to start travelling, or to start travelling in style.
We look at a way that you can increase the points that you get from making payments to the government, which can make a really big difference in your points balance.
We talk about the experience as a Qantas Gold customer, which gives access to Lounges around the world. Grab a quick shower in between flights and some complimentary food and drinks before your next adventure.
The kids loved the upgrade to Qantas Business Class.
Important point - make sure that are paying off the credit card balance each month so that you are avoiding the expensive credit card interest.
** Update **
As we having been flying around the world seeing customers and studying Restaurant marketing, I have managed to make Platinum, which give you access to the First Class Lounge. OMG! These are epic. Definitely something to think about. Woo Hoo!
**
Our BHAG is to make a meaningful difference in Restaurant Owners lives. Hopefully this will help inspire to start planning towards taking your next holiday. If it does, please send us a photo of you on holidays. We would really appreciate it.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
We talk about a Restaurant in Perth who had been struggling for years and years now. He had a Restaurant that had very poor SEO, was quite hard to find in Google. He had a purple website with no images and no online bookings. It seems that the Restaurant wasn't too bad, but the marketing was just awful. The marketing mistakes that he made over the last 4 years could have easily cost him an extra $200,000. What could he have done with an extra $200K? Or should he have closed the restaurant 4 years ago?
Either way he would have been better off if he had made a choice 4 years ago to either change something fundamental with the way that the Restaurant was run.
We also look at the tragic story of Esquire. Head Chef, Ryan Squires, had worked at elBulli, French Laundry. A great chef who has worked his guts out running a great Restaurant and he has closed it and he views it as a waste of time.
The food was immaculate at Esquire, great sommelier, eclectic mix of food and drinks. I thought the pricing was on the cheap side for the experience that they provided.
How do we build Restaurant business that give the great chefs the resources that they need to run successful Restaurants.
We look at some of the issues that Esquire had with it's marketing. Full on a Friday and Saturday night but quiet during the week, that is the hallmark of a great restaurant with marketing issues. There were a range of issues with the website and the online marketing. You don't want to have the best Restaurant that no one has ever heard of.
He had a falling out with his business partner and that left him alone. Partnerships, when they work, can be very powerful and Ryan was left with all of the problems of running the Restaurant. For a Chef like Ryan, who needs to be highly creative and focused, it is very hard to do that when you are running the business yourself.
Ryan is a highly mature chef, who approached his business in a very mature way. Hopefully we will see him back at some time in the future.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
We look at what we learnt from Dinner by Heston.
Firstly, have a think about the photos that you've got. I will put some images up in the show notes to give you an idea about the kind of photos that you can take with an entry level camera or a decent mobile phone.
Dinner by Heston has a unifying story throughout the menu - cooking food for centuries ago and reinterpreting them in a way that is interesting and compelling for customers.
Every dish had a story and they tell the story really well. There was Savoury Porridge. This was green and gives everyone something to talk about. Green Porridge. For Dinner. Savoury Porridge. Lots of interesting components to the dish to get people talking about the Restaurant.
I was lucky enough that my wife had booked the Chef's table for us. A great high value experience that gives you a close up view of the workings of the kitchen.
Our tea came with an hour glass to tell us when the tea was properly steeped. A small thing that signals the value of the experience that you are having.
As a part of the Chef's Table, we were able to see the quality assurance commitment that the team have. It shows. The steak that we had was probably the best I have ever had.
Mentoring in the Restaurant - does your head chef do this? Helping out all of the team to be their best in the team. I think mentoring is a big thing, it makes the team better and good mentoring usually means that your team members will stay with you longer because you are investing in their career.
We look at the sourcing work that the sommelier. An eclectic range of drinks that were immaculately paired with the degustation menu.
Do you have an incremental revenue opportunity from Birthday cakes?
Have a think about creating unique and epic desserts.
How can you create something, a physical link with the experience that you have created?
Are you using OpenTable? Are you getting the email addresses of your customers booking through OpenTable? Do you want to be giving them access to your booking list to another company? We talk about IP leakage and what it can cost you.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
What if you ran your Restaurant like Princess Cruises?
I spoke to a Restaurant owner and he said why think about cruises?
We look at operational efficiencies and how looking outside the Restaurant industry can give you ideas about innovation for your Restaurant. We discuss Southwest Airlines and how they redefined industry best practice in turning around the aircraft. It is a great story about culture and innovation that you can use in your Restaurant.
We look at our time from on the Sapphire Princess. We look at the food with Princess Cruises. It is amazing the quality of the food that is produced out of a floating kitchen.
We talk about what it is that your customers buy from you. Often it is not the food, sometimes it is, but there are other products that customers are looking at.
The chefs did a great job in the descriptions of the food. There were theme nights. These are things that can drive more customers on quiet nights. What if you swapped chefs with another chef to create unique events?
We talk about the experiences created by the pool, watching the TV. We discuss beatboxing squirrels.
Princess Cruises aim for a family demographic and do a lot of work around creating experiences for the entire family.
How do they upsell with their alcohol? For a family, what is your mocktail play for the children? Wine tasting seminars, cocktail making seminars. All of these are experiential events that add to the value of the cruise and are centered around food.
The chef ran a cooking demonstration, followed by a behind the scenes of the kitchen.
2670 guests and a crew of 1100. 3 square meals a day. The costings and planning are done very well, because when they can't run done the road to the local market.
The cruise industry understands revenue per available bed. They aim to fill every room that they can.
Princess Cruises really understand the power of social. The staff were always very keen to take a photo of the passengers with their own camera, knowing that the photos would be shared on social media.
How do they create great experiences around the food?
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
We discuss products and services. What is it that you do? Many restaurants that we speak to who have been running restaurants for 10 years still do not know what it is that they do and what it is that their customers buy from them.
For the numbers for your Restaurant, make sure you have pessimistic numbers in there. Too much optimism in your P+L spreadsheet makes it very hard to be long term viable.
What is your pricing strategy?
How do you put a restaurant under management?
Innovation - what is your approach to Research and Development. R + D can be a clear differentiator for your restaurant. Restaurants are designed for innovation, but too many don't innovate.
Insurance, the costs and what is covered?
Are you designing your customer for high throughput? Is your kitchen limiting the number of customers that you can manage?
What is your strategy around supplier choice - this can make a big difference for your story, your margin, and your success.
Fit out costs for your Restaurant. How can you get a cheap fitout for your restaurant?
How much inventory do you need and how will you fund it.
We look at the Restaurant Marking plan and some of the big mistakes that people make when it comes to the restaurant opening.
Trading hours. This is a small question but has some huge implications for your Restaurant. This is not an easy question to answer without a fair amount of thinking and planning.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
We talk about creating a Restaurant Business Plan as a living document to help you better run your business.
We have a copy of blank Business Plan Template and we go through the process of filling it in, and give you some ideas and guidance around the kind of information that you need to put in there.
Why is it important to create a Restaurant Business Plan?
We look at some of the resources that you can use to fill in some of the gaps that you have.
We discuss ownership structures, with the positive and the negatives that can coming from the varying structures.
We look at some sources for funding for your Restaurant, there are some sources of funding that most business don't think about.
What are the considerations for the domain name and the business name. We look at the considerations that you need to think about and some of the ways that you can protect your business and your intellectual property.
Business location. There is a lot to think about in the location of where your business will be. We talk about the implications for revenue, rent and profitability are with the locations that you select. Should you buy your premises? What are the risks and rewards of this strategy?
We look at the structure of the Restaurants organizational chart. What are the considerations here? How do you retain your key staff? Who is going to perform the roles that you need in the restaurant?
What is the succession planning for the roles in the restaurant?
How should you do your policy and procedures in the restaurant?
Hiring - where can you find the people that you need for your Restaurant? Is Facebook advertising an answer for your recruiting needs? How long will they we working in the restaurant before the restaurant opens?
How will you train your team?
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
Carrie is owner of Restaurant HR and company that specifically deals with Restaurant HR issues. She also runs CarrieLuxem.com which helps Restaurants with the broader HR issues, like leadership and culture.
We discuss the definition of Leadership and how it is so important in Restaurants.
What are some of the steps that people can take to be a better Restaurant Leader?
We also look at the relationship between culture and leadership.
Can anyone be a leader?
We talk about some books that you can read:
Rework - By Jason Fried
Start with why - Simon Synek
What are the first steps to take when you are trying to turn a restaurant around as a leader?
You need to hold people accountable to what they need to do.
At what size Restaurant is it important to create a vision?
Carrie has created resources to assist Restaurant owners to create and execute on your Restaurant's Vision, Mission and Purpose.
We talk about Linkedin and how Carrie uses it to grow her profile.
Have a look at Carrie's excellent book - Restaurant Operators HR Playbook
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
We finish off place. Have you thought of running your Restaurant like a franchise? Get the economies of scale in purchases and economies of scales in activities in your restaurants. Create an operations manual so that everyone knows what needs to be done in the restaurant.
We look at dine-in, take out and delivery.
We finish off with promotion. Promotion is not about the promotions that you run, but the channels that you use to promote your restaurant.
We look at some of the ways that you can increase the effectiveness of your promotion.
You don't want to be the best restaurant that no one has ever heard of.
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
Price Setting - How do you set the price? Price Leader, a Premium Price? How does that impact your customers and how does it impact your profitability?
We look at M Y China and one of their amazing dessert item - the Sugar Egg Puffs. These are awesome.
How does Menu Engineering fit in with your pricing? We look at the Dogs, Stars, Puzzles and Plow Horses.
Revenue Per Available Seat Hour. What is this metric, where did it come from and how important is it to your business model. How can you influence it?
Getting the balance between your fixed and variable costs is critical. How can you increase the number of hours that your restaurant is open without increasing the number of hours that you are working?
Loyalty discounts can make a big difference in increasing customer loyalty. This increases the Long Term Customer Value for each customer and increases the Return on Investment for each new customer that you find.
Payment Terms. Restaurants Love Cash! Prebookings can decrease your no show rates. Prebookings for fixed product, eg a degustation menu means you may be able to vary the price for higher demand nights.
Place - where is the the place? Is it your Restaurant?
Valet Parking? Ubers? Courtesy buses.
How do food trucks fit into the mix?
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
What are the 4Ps and the Restaurant Marking Mix?
We look at Product. It may be something that you eat or it could be something else, or a mix of both.
When you fundamentally understand the product that your customers want, you will be able to price it appropriately.
What are the demographics of people that you want to target and what is it they they want to buy? Should you change the products that you sell through the duration of the day.
What is the competitor analysis look like? If there are 8 local pizza shops, you probably don't want to be the 9th.
What do you do and do you specialise in it?
How does the length of the menu impact the time your customers take to decide.
Packaging is a part of your product. You want to avoid using other brands packaging for your food. Use the packaging to reinforce your USP.
How does Nick Sarello at Nicks Pizza and Pub use monthly customer pizza recipes to build a community.
Too many restaurants don't use just noticeable differences in their pricing strategy.
Is Price part of the Product for your menu items?
What is yield utilisation and how can you get it to work for you in your Restaurant?
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
Firstly, make sure you check you Google My Business account for your Restaurant. Incorrect information could be costing you thousands or tens of thousands of dollars!
We talk about Jamie's Italian. A restaurant chain over $100 million in debt with stories of poor food, poor team culture and poor experiences for diner's. A Sydney Jamie's Italian was filmed using packet Gnocci when they advertise making their own pasta. I am not a food lawyer, and technically, yes gnocchi is not pasta, but it highlights some of the concerns about the chain. Jamie Oliver has done an amazing amount of work, particularly with school kids, to improve the diet of millions of people and to try and limit the power of food and drink manufacturers who create unhealthy food, but it looks like a licensing deal for his name. Building scale and keeping the quality is very difficult, it comes done to leadership and procedures.
We went to Lagnaa Bare Foot Dining. This is a great Indian Restaurant in Singapore. Chef Kaesavan has done an amazing job with the menu and the experience that he creates. A lot of effort has gone into crafting the menu which does a great job of telling the story of his food. The experience is around the bare foot dining, which you need to ask for. Off menu secret items and experiences are a great way of making people feel like they are in the in crowd and everyone wants to be in the in crowd! The menu highlights child friendly food and has a heat rating for the hot dishes, with special events for those who love their food really hot.
Bailey's Galub Jamun! Everyone should go there and check out how Chef Kaesavan has put together such a great experience.
We went to Port Klang in Malaysia. There was one restaurant on Google we liked the look of, tragically it had closed, so we wandered around looking for authentic Malay food. There were a few restaurants, but none that were tourist friendly and had put in any work to attract walk ins. We ended up having some epic Japanese food.
Beard Papa - this is a chain that does the 'World's best cream puffs'. These were a favourite with the kids (young and old) and would be the perfect addition to many restaurants desserts menu, looking for something tasting and I think probably high margin.
Cow Dung Tarts in Malasia - they looked great, but I am not sure how keen I am to get more cow dung in my diet! :)
For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.
If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.
For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.
What is the Boost Juice way of marketing? How can they get PR coverage for an app update? Another example of how being a little bit out there can get you some great results.
We managed to fly to Singapore in Business Class with @qantas, which was super awesome. Make sure you are looking into your credit cards and the points you collect! We got the upgrade with points which was super cool.
We talk about the Tourist Traps. These restaurants rely on tourists, sting them and know that people will never come back. It was hideously expensive for what it was and we got tricked by the happy hour deals.
We found Tokyo $5 Izakaya. This was a great restaurant. There was no website, only a hungrygowhere listing. This was clearly not enough because they are now closed :(. They had great food, great value and provided a great experience, but it is no good being the best restaurant that no one has ever heard of. Not having a website meant no Google places entry and less customers.
Avocado Espresso smoothie - the Avo Freak from The Hangar.
We visited Hong Kong Soya Sauce, Chicken Rice and Noodle. How can hawker food get 1 star from the Michelin Guide. What is the lesson for you in menu design from the street food hawkers.
What lessons are there from Singaporean Street Food. How can you create innovative meals and experiences with ideas from street food. We look at packaging with Meatballs in a bucket! Molten Raclette Cheese is an amazing taste!
Travelling is great for the soul and it is great for inspiration as you can see what other people and other cultures are doing with food and this can help you in your kitchen and in your restaurant to be more innovative and creation. Restaurant innovation can be a key ingredient in restaurant profitability.
This podcast started with an article in the Sydney Morning Herald that described Menulog as "the business partner he never wanted".
We look at Restaurant Brandjacking and websites set up by online aggregators which look like the web
Adwords Arbitrage. We discuss how restaurants can advertise on Google Adwords and get clicks to their platforms, not your website. We talked about this with Kyle Welter who used to work at Google and understands how big companies use this practice.
We discuss how the margins that restaurants are charged by online aggregators and how some restaurants are dealing with the large fees that they are charged.
How does the restaurant circle of life work and how can you avoid being of the restaurants that fails.
Domain squatting - We have issues with big companies like Menulog registering domains 'on behalf' of restaurants. This becomes their property and they will build one of their websites, which don't have your phone number and don't havedirect contact details for your Restaurant. Each order coming from that website is charged the commission that they normally charge.
Variable commission campaigns - restaurants are now getting a better placement in the online aggregator platforms by paying higher commission. We have seen this with Grub Hun in the United States.
Vertical integration risk - Are the delivery companies like UberEats and Deliveroo looking to cook their own food? Deliveroo Editions is just one step away from Deliveroo cutting the Restaurant out of the entire picture for their business. As they look to increase profit margins, I think that it is a really big risk for restaurants. The restaurants are low cost with very low property costs. If they learn to cook, they could be very difficult to compete against.
Franchise restaurants are starting to look at delivery options and online ordering aggregators. This may squeeze out the small restaurants that were the traditional customers of the aggregators.
Is your brand at risk from other companies? Brand risk is increasing as big companies work to build their brands, not yours.
Risks to the restaurants when using delivery companies include the lose of control over the time and delivery service that is provide. We discuss some of the interesting stories about delivery riders from the big delivery companies.
The risks for UberEats and Deliveroo include whether the deliver rider is an independant contractor or an employee. There will be more scrutiny on this, especially around the minimum wages. What is UberEats long term plan - we discuss their race against time.
Are battery powered delivery scooters are viable option for Restaurants to build out their own delivery service?
Have you thought out about pick up only services for your restaurant? It is the perfect accompaniment for a restaurant with spare kitchen capacity.
Are you using a Restaurant loyalty campaign for your online orders? Our Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering system (FROLO) provides a built in loyalty campaign that works really well to increase the frequency of customer purchases. FROLO supports a receipt printer, SMS notifications and even a mobile orders management system.
Drive your customers to Order Direct and Save!
It's good for customers and great for you! :)
Oohbah Butler is a journalist who writes for Vice. He used to be employed to write fake reviews on Tripadvisor, getting paid £10 for each review. He had concerns about the impact that the fake reviews were having, so he created a crappy website for the Shed at Dulwich, a restaurant that only existed on the High Street of his mind and started getting his friends to write reviews for it.
In April 2017 - he set up the Restaurant and it is appointment only. His menu was based on emotions. He went from being ranked 18,000 to the top 1,500 restaurants in a couple of months.
The phone starts to ring (he bought a burner phone for the restaurants). He often didn't answer the phone, so people were thinking that they were very successful. Nothing gets a queue like a queue! If he did answer the phone, he said they were booked out for 6 weeks and hang up,
August - number 156. The restaurant is getting job applications.
Gets the restaurant to number 30. There are people looking in the street for where it is.
Tripadvisor contacts him and they are the number 1 restaurant on Tripadvisor.
Oohbah decides to go to the next level, so he opens the restaurant for a night. Have a listen to find out how the opening night goes.
His experiment was to see if a Fake Restaurant could be popular on Tripadvisor.
There are important lessons for Restaurants about how platforms like Tripadvisor can be gamed and also how you can use demand management to your advantage.
This is also an example of the Emporer's new Clothes.
This also highlights the issues with the Tripadvisor algorithm and just how it doesn't work. I've given up on Tripadvisor because of the number of Restaurants I've been to that are rally highly rated on Tripadvisor, but the Restaurant turns out to be awful.
There is a significant difference between Google and Facebook ratings and there could be an issue with people not given their real details making the reviews.
Oohbah's story on the Shed at Dulwich went viral when he came clean with what he had done.
We also look at the the viral marketing from the White Moose Cafe and how their response created a different kind of viral response. Their approach is a lot riskier, but highly effective for them.
Our advice is to avoid Yelp entirely. It has very expensive marketing campaigns that some restaurants have found to be nearly useless.
Woo Hoo! You've just done a weeks' worth of Restaurant Marketing.
Find out what works and what doesn't with your Restaurant Marketing plan.
Email Marketing - The simplest and cheapest way to fill a Restaurant on a Midwinter's Tuesday night
Facebook is pay to play now. This is a great thing. The budgets are low, the returns are high.
Some sites change every week, some haven't changed since 2002
When did you last post to your Restaurant's Facebook page?
The Menu is the critical in most restaurants, it is part sales, part marketing, part art, part science, and part soul and part passion - yet so few people work to improve it.
It's a management truism that gets measured gets managed, that goes for Restaurant Marketing as well.
Last podcast covered the trends and the megatrend for indie restaurants. We look at the trends for restaurants we see in 2018.
5. Experience Design – VR experience at Restaurant Lume, Saved by the Max in Chicago and now LA. These are examples of restaurants that are doing a great job with designeing an experience. Where there is experience, there is margin!
6. Zero waste – decrease food costs and environmentally responsible. Consumers are looking for more opportunities to dine at eco friendly restaurants.
7. Meal labelling – In an effort to improve health, consumers are a lot more interested in the ingredients that are in the meals that they are eating and the carbs and fats in the meals, allowing them to make better choices.
8. Health – Flexitarianism and a growing trend towards people’s changing tastes as they look for a more healthy diet. People will still want to have a great experience, but decouple it from being a ‘naughty treat’. How can you improve the healthy benefits of your food. Sub niching towards meals like ketogenic meals.
9. Hyperlocal – building an ecosystem around the local area. Food precincts, partner with other restaurants and other businesses to leverage different strengths.
10. Fine casual – providing elements of fine dining with a casual dining type experience. Bring those elements into a medium price point. Expensive cutlery in a hamburger joint with table service enabling them to increase the price point that is sustainable.
11. Cuisine – More non traditional cuisines like Israeli, Filippino and Eastern European cuisine based restaurants. These restaurants traditionally target their expat market, but the focus will be on building that cuisines brand and building a strong repeat customer base out of locals who have never experienced that culture.
12. Menu experimentation – more weird things are going to appear, like chicken donuts.
13. Story telling – What is your authentic, passionate story? How does it relate to your customers and how are you going to tell that story?
14. Marketing – Restaurants will be forced to start taking their marketing a lot more seriously. Running Facebook ads will become increasingly popular. We see only 5% of indie restaurants running Facebook ads and that will increase dramatically next year. Facebook videos – this is really the hottest marketing tool available to restaurants today. More restaurants will look at those restaurants killing it on FB videos and think “why not me?” and after those first couple of awkward videos, you will see a big improvement in return. (Have a look at some of our first videos – they were awful!)
The changes we are seeing are:
Changing / Evolving consumer tastes - looking for new experiences.
Workforce management - the skills shortage is will drive significant change as restaurants look to manage their teams better in the face of declining numbers of people choosing hospitality careers.
Profitability will be the mega trend for the next 5 years. More restaurants are saying that it has never been harder to run a profitable restaurant.
Profitability is becoming increasingly important with increasing costs in a lot of areas and some tech companies becoming increasingly aggressive in the fees that they are charging.
Culture driven dining will become increasingly important with Restaurants looking for better ways to hire and retain the best staff in order to create the experiences for consumers that they need to create in order to be competitive.
More technology in Restaurants, especially as there is more tech available that is no cost or low cost that can make a big difference for a small business.
Ordering Commoditisation – Menulog, Just Eat, Delivery Hero, Deliveroo and UrbanEats are changing take out and delivery fundamentally and it is creating massive cost pressures for Restaurants. This will see more restaurants leaving the platforms as well as a consumer backlash as they see decreasing quality from financially struggling restaurants.
Lease Innovation – Restaurants will look for different solutions to the traditional lease. Looking at different spaces and an increasing in the ‘shipping container’ kitchen that Deliveroo has pioneered, but with the Restaurants in control of the process.
6 - Marketing is all about discounting. A lot of Restaurants already discount, especially if you are doing lunch or breakfast meals. We look at dynamic yield pricing for Restaurants.
7 - We are killing it on Instagram, (or Twitter or Snapchat) - we don't need any other marketing. Marketing must, Must, MUST be tied to revenue and too many people think that having 100,000 people following them on Instagram, but you can't meet payroll with Instagram followers or likes.
8 - Our third party provider does all of our marketing. Restaurants using people like Menulog, Dimmi, OpenTable, Just Eat, GrubHub, think that they are doing marketing on their behalf. The 3rd parrty providers do marketing on their own behalf, not yours, especially,
9- We can't afford a $1,000 a month marketing budget. We have restaurants doing 1,000 seats a month. With Dimmi that is $1,000 a month! We recommend spending $3 - $10 a day on Facebook marketing. We are also looking at a results driven marketing campaign as well. Too many people are spending $3,000 a month with companies that aren't focused on revenue.
10 - We need to do brand marketing. You should always be looking at your sales funnel and drive people into the funnel. Great social media driving customers to websites that tell an engaging story and convert with great photos and menus and customer experiences.
11 - I am too old to do the marketing for my Restaurant. This is a poor excuse. If it is your restaurant, it is your story that your customers want to hear and Restaurant Marketing isn't Rocket Science. Anyone can learn the basics of the tools that work really well to help you tell your Restaurant's story.
12 - I already have a website. Restaurant owners don't want a Restaurant Website, they want a Restaurant eCommerce machine that generates revenue. Don't let your main sales person in your team (your restaurant's website) do nothing - it should be working really hard. Make sure you know the metrics, make sure it is fast, make sure it is optimized for mobile, make sure it tells your story.
If you need help with your Restaurant website, have a look at our Restaurant specific way of helping you to tell your Restaurant's story.
Wouldn't you be sad if your Restaurant was missing out on $100,000 a year in revenue because you believed a couple of these myths. We discuss what we hear from Restaurants vs what we actually seeing as working for Restaurants around the world.
We look at Restaurant Dark Kitchens and how they are starting to change the way that food is delivered to Restaurants.
1. SEO is a monthly ongoing cost - what is this all about? Restaurant Keyword Optimisation - can be a can of worms and often it comes down to a monthly report only a lot of the time. Some restaurants are paying thousands of dollars every month for no real services.
2. If your Restaurants name comes up number 1 when someone searches for it, you have great SEO. There are 2 types of people out there and you are only reaching 1 group (the much smaller group) if you are only getting traffic when people type in your Restaurants name. We discuss the secret of SEO and how you can use that secret to dramatically grow the number of people going to your restaurant. If someone doesn't know about your Restaurant, how many will find your Restaurant in Google - the answer should be lots!
3. Great restaurants don't need marketing. Too many times great restaurants with great food are outdone by crappy restaurants with great marketing. You don't want to be the best restaurant that no one has ever heard of.
4. Restaurant Email Marketing doesn't work. Email marketing is great because it goes to people who know your Restaurant and it is very cheap to run and they are a great part of the yield utilisation process. The hard part is building your marketing database.
5. Facebook no longer works. Ongoing changes to the Facebook platform have meant that some restaurants don't think Facebook works any more. Listen to last week's episode about Mama's BBQ Chicken and Salad Bar and how they got 1,000,000 views on Facebook. For everyone who can't dance like Wally, :), it has become pay to play, but the budgets are often just $3 per day. We talk about our new Marketing University course on running your first Facebook Marketing ad campaign.
We talk to Wally from Mama's BBQ Chicken and Salad Bar and the process he has used with Facebook Live videos to turn around his business.
The Chicken Shop wasn't doing too well, some weeks needing to put money in to keep it running. This is a problem that far too many Restaurant owners are all too familiar with.
To try and turn things around, Wally started doing some Facebook Live videos. More people started watching and he started dancing on the videos. Over time his followers built up and he now has over 2,000,000 views for his videos.
He has been on TV multiple times and dramatically turned around the his business.
He has grabbed the slogan 'Flavour, flavour, flavour', after mentioning it in one of his videos and seeing the reaction that people have had with it.
No script - just Wally's passion for his food, his business and his customers. This and Wally's epic dancing skills :) have created content that has gone viral with very little marketing spend. Very few of the videos are boosted, which is a testament to his passion and how he has tapped into what people want to see. His videos have even been made into a rap song by one of his fans!
The effect on the business has been massive. He has turned a business around that was late on making payments to tripling revenue and being a lot more successful.
This is a powerful story about how your Passion can really be the big difference in your Restaurant when you match it up with technology like Facebook Live.
Processes - How do your team know what it is that they are meant to be doing and how do you ensure consistency across visits for customers. Work out where the problems are and create a system around that procedure. This is a part of winning back more of your time. There will be less questions for you and less time fixing up mistakes.
Restaurant Business Plan - Lets review the Business Plan that you had before you opened and update it with the reality that is your restaurant. Look at the numbers and start to think about how you are going to make them work. Once you identify your current numbers and what you need, that will start to create some of the action steps that you need to take.
KPIs - what are the numbers that are important for your Restaurants? Customer numbers, average check size, food costs, delivery vs pick up orders. These come out of your Business Plan and help everyone on the team understand how they are tracking.
Finances - you need to understand the finances because if you don't you are never really going to have control over your restaurant, you'll never be able to manage it. What are the levers that you can pull to increase profitability. Understanding the finances can help you with things like negotiating the lease.
Menu - Your menu is an important sales tool for your Restaurant. How hard is your menu working? Have you ever costed the menu? Too many restaurants don't cost the menu and go out of business as a consequence. COST THE MENU! Do it today. How many items are on the menu? How long do they take to prepare? How much of the throughput of the kitchen do some items take up? Marketable, costed items that can be prepared quickly are critical to the restaurant.
Marketing - last but least, marketing. You need to fix the other issues before you look at the marketing. If the food is not great, you don't want more people coming in. You want your product and experience to be great before you start marketing. What is the USP, what is your story and how are you telling it?
Have a listen to the low cost and no cost ideas to help you build the restaurant that you always wanted.
This is a self first aid program for Restaurant Owners to help you build the restaurant that you always wanted and that you can be proud of.
We are focusing on small iterative steps that are low or no cost for Restaurants
How do you know if you need to do a Restaurant Rescue?
If are working 60 -70 hours a week and not loving every minute of it, then you need to think about Restaurant Rescue.
Once you've made that decision, you need to write down the kind of Restaurant you want to run.
- How many hours do you want to work?
- How much money do you want to make?
- What kind of reputation do you want to have?
This is your Restaurant Gap Analysis. What is happening now and what do you want it to be. This is the first step to start on your Restaurant Rescue.
Start writing down all of the problems that you have.
- Food, money, front of house, stock control, customer service, cash flow, customer numbers, repeat customers.
Talk to your customers and your staff and get some honest criticism and feedback.
The next thing to do is to look at the appearance of your Restaurant. Are you attracting walk - ins. Honestly, how does the Restaurant look? What is the interior like?
Start to look at the Culture of the Restaurant. What is the vision of the restaurant, what are the values and how does your team know what those values are? How do you turn around the culture of your team?
Look at the team. How do you hiring and firing processes work? How does someone know if they have had a good day or not in your Restaurant?
We look at how Restaurant Innovation can help you build a more profitable Restaurant business.
What is the link between Innovation and Creativity.
We look at the Triad Technique, Inputs and Creativity and how that feeds into creating an innovative menu, an innovative restaurant and an innovative business.
We look at the approach to the ingredients that Shaun uses with sourcing ingredients. How does the selection of ingredients interact with the menu and the guests?
We walk through the process of how Shaun creates one of his amazing dishes, the Sea Corn Taco. What is the problem that he is trying to solve with it? What techniques did he use and how did it evolve to being the item that can open the Menu?
How can technology change the dining experience? What is Lume doing with Virtual Reality?
We talk about the work of Charles Spence.
We look at failure in the Restaurant. So many people shy away from failure on the menu and in the Restaurant, but it is a critical part of the Innovation process.
We talk about how you innovative when you've got a menu that works.
If you aren't innovating, then you are probably dying.
The team at Marketing4Restaurants.com have been busy creating our first courses for Restaurant owners. We are about to open the Marketing4Restaurants University. We are creating a series of online courses to take you by the hand and skill up you and your team on how to run your own Restaurant marketing campaigns. This is a really exciting development.
We cover what is the story for your Restaurant, what it impacts and why you need one and how to create one. We go through so examples of Restaurants with great stories.
Is the story for your Restaurant tie in with your Restaurant Business plan?
We look at Paymasters whose story is about great food. The same with Aangan in Melbourne. These are Restaurants based on great food. Too many Restaurants have a story based on great food, when in reality the food isn't that great. Not having great food isn't a big killer, unless that is what your story is.
Jestine's Kitchen has an amazing example of the kind of story that can work really well. It has a great reputation and that story really closes the deal when you think about a place to try some real Southern food. (I loved the Oyster Podboy! and Grits!) :)
We talk about the story of Fergburger and who a story can really help your great food get noticed and to really take your business to the next level. This is the best burger I've eaten anywhere and it has become synonymous with with Queenstown.
Stratosfare also in Queenstown. They have good food, but the thing that makes them a must do destination is the view from the Restaurant. It is absolutely amazing.
Another great story is Cinnanmon Snail. An amazing business with ridiculously good food. Adam is a Vegan and he wants to introduce meat eaters to Vegan food by cooking the tastiest Vegan food ever. Check out his videos, the food is really amazing.
We talk about how to come up with a story for the local Thai, Chinese or Indian restaurant and how you can bundle that into a story that will help you to attract customer.
We talk about integrating sub stories into your story, so that you can attract more targeted markets in your local area.
Finally we look at Mama's BBQ Chicken and Salad bar and Waleed Khawli. Waleed runs a local Chicken and Chips shop. Check out his video that has been seen by 882,642 people. I think the music is a big part of the virality of this as well as his great dancing skills.
We talk to Restaurant Sales expert Robbie Doyle from Buy Grow Sell. We look at the tactics that you can use and how you can best plan for the restaurant sale so that you can get the best sale price for your Restaurant.
We discuss:
- When should you start to think about selling your Restaurant?
- How to prepare to sell your Restaurant?
- How do you work out the sale price of the Restaurant?
- What kind of buyers are out there?
- Which one is the best one to attract?
- How can you maximise the price that you get?
- How to select a broker?
- What are the risks in selling a Restaurant?
There are lots of tips on how to maximise the sale price for your Restaurant in this podcast. If you have any questions, reach out to Robbie and he will give you some great advice to help you understand the process.
The Restaurant industry is often a very tough
Today we interview Chef Shaun Quade from Restaurant Lume, and how his journey with mental illness has interacted with his journey to opening Australia's most creative Restaurant.
This is an important subject for anyone who is travelling with mental illness issues (which is a lot of us), and also really important for anyone working with or employing people with mental health issues. The outcomes of mental health can be incredibly tragic, so this is a very important topic to talk about.
The impact on mental health is exacerbated in the Restaurant industry because of a lot of the factors particular to hospitality, the high paced work environment, the incredibly high standards that restaurants strive to attain and maintain. For owners, these pressures are multiplied by the pressures of running a business, payroll, finance issues and managing people. We talk about the impact that reviews platforms have in some of the issues that are created by some of the reviews that are written about Restaurants.
Chef Quade has worked at a number of highly successful restaurants in the country and has used his work in the kitchen as a kind of therapy that has helped him. He has also accepted that his mind works differently to other peoples and we discuss how this accentuates his creative talent.
Everyone has a different road to travel and Chef Quade's is jut one, but I think that there is something for everyone to help them get a better understanding of what it can be like living with mental illness as well as for those in a team environment.
Please listen to this podcast and have a think about how we can all work together to destigmatise mental illness and help out our mates who are struggling with mental illness.
A massive thank you to Chef Quade for sharing his story. It is a difficult topic to talk about particularly if it is your story and Chef Quade has shared fearlessly his story as a part of an effort to help others out. Thank you!
We look at the role that wine plays in a restaurant as a part of the experience that you are creating for your customers.
What is the process that you should use in building a wine list and how does that reflect on the customers that you are looking to attract to your restaurant and what the menu is like.
How can you use dynamic content on the wine list to increase the number of times that a customer will return to your restaurant.
The linkage between wineries and restaurants are increasing to get closer as wineries look for wide distribution channels and restaurants look for ways that they can create new experiences for their customers. Partnering with a local winery can give you access to the wine makers and enable you to create bespoke dinner events like paired degustation menus, which are perfect for the quieter nights of the week to drive higher revenue.
Should you be dealing with a wine rep or direct from the winery? What are the benefits of dealing with a wine rep? How can a wine distributor.
As a chef who doesn't know a lot about wine, how can you take your first steps in creating your own wine list? There are a lot of resources available to help you skill up yourself and your team around your wines?
What are the important things to train your FOH team up on when dealing with customers about wine?
How do you price your bottles of wine? This is a big question that a lot of restaurants struggle with. We look at some of the factors that you need to think about when coming up with the price you should charge for your wine.
How often should you turn over your wine inventory? Some wine programs have significant investments, so getting the wine mix right and being able to turn it over quickly is key to running a successful wine program.
Lastly we look at some of the mistakes that people make when putting a wine program together.
Have a look at Chris' book, This is not a Wine Guide.
We look at Just Eats latest profit results. Orders growth is slowing and they are relying more for Revenue growth on top placement, which is where Restaurants pay for higher results in the Just Eat listings. In Australia, Menulog has struggled with the entry of UberEats and Deliveroo and our Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering system.
In this podcast we look at how you can build a community in your Restaurant. Looking at a place like Nick's Pizza and Pub, you can see the way that Facebook represents the integrated, community focused marketing plan that Nick Sarillo has at Nick's.
Marketing with suppliers. Telling the story of your suppliers can really help you to tell your story better. Your suppliers are often struggling to get traction with their customers, so if you are marketing heir great produce, you may be able to access marketing funds or resources like a wine maker from your local winery to help run a wine tasting. You can even run joint marketed events, engaging with not only your email marketing list, but possibly your suppliers.
Marketing to journalists. There are a lot less journalists now, which means that journalists are very time poor. This means that you can start telling a story about your Restaurant that is newsworthy. (Hint: The best place to interact with Journalists is on Twitter.) In dealing with bloggers and journos, have a think about the way that Danny Meyer in Setting the Table. Every restaurant should have a PR plan and Facebook can be a great way of driving your PR plan.
We like to use email marketing with Facebook. You can upload your email list into Facebook (if you are happy to) to increase the conversion rate of campaigns by running an ad to people who have already received an email.
The 9th way of our 8 ways to use Facebook to grow your restaurant is to use Facebook for market research. This means that you can have better dishes on the menu and you are creating connections and relationships with people as they help you to create the dishes that they want. These customers will be more likely to come into your Restaurant to try that meal when they see that meal advertised.
To many people think that Facebook is just selling stuff, but there is a lot more that you can do with it.
In Restaurant Autopsy, we talk about a Restaurant that looks like it is entering the Groupon Death Spiral :(. There are a lot of things that you can do that are free or don't take a lot of time, or are free and don't take a lot of time, and yet they still don't get done and this is how Restaurants end up using Groupon out of desperation to try and keep the doors open.
We look at the Lobster Cave's Groupon strategy. They are one of the few Restaurants that have a decent discounting strategy.
We look at how to run very cheap and cost effective Facebook campaigns and often the budget is just $3 per day.
1. Sell stuff. Have a think about what it is that you are selling and how you are reaching out to customers and prospects. You can drive people to make an order and/or booking. You can then make your marketing accountable. Our FROLO and FORBS system will tell you where your bookings come from and this can make a big difference in understanding how effective your marketing is. You don't need a discount, it may just remind people about your great food. Don't forget to drive people to call for take out or book, or even as a walk in.
2. Targeting. We show you how targeting can dramatically increase the response rate from your campaigns. There is a huge range of options in the Facebook demographics section of the ad setup. This creates a simple way to run a birthday campaign. If yu don't have a database, you can use Facebook's database with targeting.
3. Retargeting. This is how to target people who have been on your website, you can even target based on individual pages that they have visited.
4. Recruiting. We use Facebook to recruit staff. We have found it to work so much better than using Job Boards. On Facebook, it is a lot easier for prospective employees to see what kind of Restaurant you run and you are more likely to attract the right kind of people. You can target people in the job role that you want. It often works out a lot cheaper to advertise on Facebook than on a Job Board and best of all, the talent pool is so much better.
Stay tuned for the next Episode with the other 4 ways that we work to build Restaurant businesses!
Kyle Welter works at Tock, an ethical online booking and restaurant management software company.
We look at how Google Adwords works for Restaurants. Not many Restaurants use Google Adwords, but companies like OpenTable and Dimmi use it very aggressively to come between their 'Restaurant partners' and the restaurant customers.
We look at Arbitrage. This is the process where you buy something in one market and sell it in another market at a higher price.
Companies like Dimmi and OpenTable use Adwords Arbitrage to steal your customers contact details (and sometimes they don't share them with you!) and as well as creating the impression that it is their marketing that is bringing customers to you, when in fact it is often your existing, regular customers that OpenTable is charging you a higher price to take that booking.
The email address is the easiest way to communicate with your customers and Adwords Arbitrage allows Dimmi and OpenTable to get between your customers
Online Ordering has very similar practices. Restaurants are paying 13% commission and not getting the customers email address, so they can't remarket to the customer, they have to rely on JustEat, Menulog or GrubHub to provide them their next customer. This is how Online Ordering aggregators build dependence on their platforms and extract such high fees for doing it.
The impact for Restaurants can be crippling. We see Restaurants paying over $1,000 a month in commissions, and some high traffic restaurants can be a lot higher, which for some restaurants can be the difference from staying in business and bankruptcy, or being not profitable and profitable, so the choice of booking or ordering partner is a crucial part of your marketing plan and even your business plan.
We talk about dynamic pricing. This as an area that Tock specialises in. Charge more for your peak times, and drive demand out into the shoulder times. Airlines drive yield utilisation with dynamic pricing and popular restaurants should be looking at charging different prices for different tables, different days and different hours to dine in their restaurant. Dynamic pricing with pre paid bookings significantly decreases no shows as well.
We also talk about the Google knowledge panel and how restaurants can better manage it.
The best advice is to open a chrome browser in incognito mode and search for your Restaurant. Look at who is running ads and look at the information in the Google Search Panel. You may want to try different times of the day. This will give you a really good idea of what your customers are seeing when they Google for your Restaurant.
If you need access to free tools to help your grow your email database without paying commissions and without sharing your customers contact details, check out:
The Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering system.
The Free Online Restaurant Booking system.
We discuss some of the retargetting methods for Google Analytics and Facebook Pixels. One of the Restaurants featured in the Cheap Eats guide 2017 for Melbourne only had a Menulog website. It had Google Analytics tag manager and the Facebook Pixel on the website they provided to the restaurant. Menulog makes a lot of money out of these marketing techniques. They aren't too hard to set up and every restaurant should have it set up for them.
Chef Shaun Quade's night on Masterchef required a lot of preparation. We built a website for Restaurant Lume that had the pixel installed, had Google Analytics installed. It was designed to scale, with a lot of visitors at once and it was designed to show the Restaurant of in the best way. Chef Quade has some amazing photos of the food and we needed to display them in the best possible way.
The first mistake people make is not having a website.
The Website had 10 people on the website at once before the show. The traffic jumped to 50, then to 300 in the space of minutes. That is 300 people at one time! It then climbed to 450, 700 and topped out at 1,148 people at once. The website was serving 25 pages per second. 90% of that traffic was from mobile phones. This was because people were sitting down watching Masterchef and had their phones with them.
We used an Amazon AWS server to be able to scale so that everyone hitting the server at once would be able to see the website. Chef Quade had 4 friends appear on Masterchef and all 4 had their websites crash. It doesn't need to be like that.
Check out the Show Notes to see the video of the traffic that they generated on the night.
Make sure that you have Facebook pixel installed.
Make sure you take bookings online. Restaurant Lume uses Tock and was able to take $15,000 of bookings in the first 30 minutes of being on Masterchef. If their website was down, many of those customers would not have come back and so those bookings would have been lost.
The last mistake is using the wrong booking or ordering system. If you are using Menulog, Just Eat, Delivery Hero, OpenTable, Dimmi or Quandoo, you are sharing or losing your customer contact details AND you are being charged per seat or per order. This places you at a massive disadvantage compared to those using different systems, like the Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering System or the Free Online Restaurant Booking System.
Hopefully you've got some ideas about how to generate your own Masterchef effect and you will be really well prepared with an online marketing strategy for your Restaurant to make sure you capture all of the benefits that you can for your Restaurant.
We talk about the Masterchef Effect. The Masterchef Effect occurs when your Restaurant gets a huge amount of publicity. It could be from getting a great review on a popular website, winning an award, have a meal or event go viral or being featured on national TV, like Masterchef. Too many restaurants aren't prepared for the Masterchef Effect and as such they miss out on the ongoing benefits of their huge Public Relations win. In this two part podcast, we examine the preparations 20 restaurants have taken after being featured in The Age Top 20 Cheap Eats for 2017 list and what happened to Restaurant Lume when Chef Shaun Quade was featured on Masterchef.
The Age has released the Melbourne's Top 20 Cheap Eats for 2017 list in Melbourne. Here are 20 restaurants that have done a great job of bringing together a team, the ingredients, the menu, the FOH experience and the marketing. (No point in having the best restaurant that no one has ever heard of!)
The Cheap Eats guide has just 3 lines of text about each Restaurant, so people are looking for more information about your Restaurant to make a buying decision. Without a website, you aren't able to tell the story of your Restaurant that you have put so much work into in any way that does it justice.
You goal doesn't need to be on Masterchef, but you need to have an attitude that sets you apart. Chan Hon Meng from Hong Kong Soya Sauce Chicken Rice and Noodle won a Michelin star and he said that everyone should cook like a Michelin judge is eating in their restaurant everyday. If you thought like that, how much better would you run your Restaurant?
How can you capitalise on the public relations when you get the Masterchef Effect?
In the Good Food Cheap Eats guide
- 8 / 20 restaurants did not have a website.
- 1 restaurant had their website taken down because of too much traffic (!)
- 1 only had a Menulog website (no phone number, no bookings, no emails :(
- 6 had Google Analytic on their website
- 2 had the Facebook Pixel installed (THIS IS A MASSIVE ISSUE!)
- 1 website was Weebly. It is cute that Weebly is still around.
- 1 website had Wix. Friends don't let friends use Wix.
- Most common was Wordpress (which is good.) Only 2 had Yoast installed.
- Some were using OpenTable (no email addresses)
- No one was using Dimmi - is Dimmi losing traction in Australia.
- 1 Restaurant using Menulog. No emails, just bills.
- 2 websites weren't mobile optimized.
- 8 Restaurants had not claimed their Google knowledge panel. (Your competitors could claim it and tell Google the restaurant is permanently closed)
- The Zomato reviews were 23% lower than Facebook reviews. Are Zomato reviews a lot less reliable than Facebook and Google Reviews?
These are some of the critical things that you need to prepare for your next great Public Relations success.
The next episode will cover off the technical procedures to prepare for the Restaurant Lume being featured on Masterchef, including how much traffic was served up over the length of the episode (a lot!!!)
Hooray - Episode 50. Thank you so much to everyone who has contributed to the Secret Sauce podcast since we started.
We look at how a lot of Restaurants miss some fundamental marketing steps and when they get a great public relations win they aren't in a position to capitalise on that win. Too many restaurants don't have a website, they don't have the Facebook pixel installed, they which means it is a lot harder to build a strong brand and find new customers and turn them into repeat customers.
We discuss what intellectual property and intangible assets. These can have an impact on the price that you pay when you buy a restaurant and definitely can impact the price of the restaurant that you sell for.
Does a restaurant have an email list? How big is it and how
Domain Names - These are sometimes registered by aggegators like Menulog, or they can register a similar name.
Facebook Pages - who is the owner of the Facebook page, who has access to it?
Do you have an unofficial Facebook Page? Is there a site that Facebook created for you? You need to claim that.
Do you have an unofficial Google My Business account? You need to claim that and ensure that the information is correct. We have seen peoples business listed as Permanently Closed and they are still open. Very few customers would go to a Restaurant that Google has listed as Permanently Closed and unfortunately dodgey competitors may list your restaurant as permanently closed.
Check out your restaurants google listing from an incognito mode browser so that you can see your restaurants as other people will see it.
Look for fake websites. We see this all the time and there are thousands of restaurant brand jacking websites, set up by shonky online ordering companies.
Brand jacking can mean that you are missing out on all of the emails of your customers.
Check the details of your Google Knowledge Panel. Many restaurant aggregators can try to hijack the Google Knowledge Panel to hijack your customers. We look at restaurant adwords arbitrage and how it can be costing your Restaurant tens of thousands of dollars every year.
We talk about how companies like Dimmi can attempt to hijack customers look for your restaurant and drive them to a restaurant using Dimmi. We wrote an article about what happened to Brae and how Dimmi was trying to steal their customers.
Make a booking at your own restaurant with a new gmail account and see what kind of emails you receive from your booking company.
We finish of with a story of how restaurant aggregators want to minimise the impact of your brand and your story. The only way that they can stand out in these online ordering platforms is with price, which decreases their ability to really create some awesome food.
If you are having issues with your Google Knowledge Panel, Facebook Page, fake websites or domain name hijackers, please contact the M4R team, we deal with these issues every day and we know the best ways to help you to protect your own intellectual property.
We talk to Robbie Doyle from Buy Grow Sell about the pitfalls and opportunities in negotiating a Restaurant property lease.
This is particularly topical in Australia, with Sumo Salad putting two leasing companies into Administration because of the difficulties that they have had in negotiating the leases with Westfield. Westfield, like a lot of shopping centre owners have tried to respond to decreasing retail trade by increasing the experiential opportunities for customers, and this has seen an increase in the number of restaurants in shopping centres with no increase in customers, in fact some shopping centres are seeing decreasing foot traffic.
Where can restaurant owners find properties that have affordable rents?
We discuss some of traps that can be included in a lease offer.
We look at how many restaurant owners buy their property versus leasing. Buying gives you a friendly landlord, but it is expensive and if the restaurant goes badly, you have a struggling lease and a struggling tenant to deal with at the same time.
What are the different types of lease that are available and how can you structure that with your exit plan, especially when you factor in the fitout costs that will be sunk into the property.
If you've got questions on Restaurant Leases, Robbie has very generously offered to help you out, so contact him at www.buygrowsell.com.au
Should you get a lawyer to review your Restaurant Lease? Robbie discusses some of the caveats that can be put onto a lease, and how they can affect your over the time of the lease.
What are the parts of the lease that are negotiable and how can you get the best terms for your Restaurant? Robbie provides some great insights into what Landlords can be thinking and the factors that drive the way that they negotiate.
Robbie shares a lot of great insights into the Restaurant Leasing process that can make the process a lot less painful for you the next time that you need to negotiate a lease.
We finish off with the great story of Robbie's first Restaurant. A talented chef, he was undercapitalised, but with a little out of the box thinking, he was able to get his first start in a Restaurant. His story has some great ideas in it for those struggle to get the money together to begin their own Restaurant story.
We talk about Kalimera Souvlaki Art, which was recently written up in the New York Times by Sam Sifton. How does a Souvlaki Restaurant in Melbourne Australia get written up in the New York Times?
We talk to Veronica Fil, the Business Manager at Restaurant Lume. Lume was voted the Gault and Millau Restaurant of the Year in 2016.
Lume works very hard to create unique experiences for diners. They use actors, script writers and use psychological tests to work and are pushing the boundaries in the way that food is experienced in their restaurant. The are attracting a significantly younger audience market than a traditional fine dining venue.
Understanding their customers is a critical part of the Lume experience. With a high percentage of customers from China, they learned that many were not drinking wine, so they created a tailored mocktail drink pairing with their meal.
Lume has adopted Virtual Reality to push the boundary on the way that their guests experience their food. They have created VR experiences that significantly pushes the limits of multi sensory dining. By combining the story of the ingredients, the preparation and the restaurant into a Virtual Reality experience with scents, auditory cues and tactile sensations.
Restaurant Lume has reduced No Shows to zero in their restaurant. This is a phenomenal result because No Shows in fine dining are especially expensive in fine dining. They adopted Tock as a booking engine that takes pre bookings. They were losing up to $3,000 a week to zero. This is the difference between Lume surviving through to the point where they are very popular and having run out of cash and going out of business.
Lume has a reputation of providing some of the best Corporate Event experiences in the country. Large corporate customers looking for something to WOW their customers with and provide their customers with a unique experience have becoming For one event they created a perfume for the event, a bespoke menu based on local ingredients of the customer, they had a photographer at the event and used those photographs to create a cook book of the recipes from the event with photos of the participants in it. The diners get a memento of the event, a cook book that features photos of themselves delivered to them weeks after the event, reminding them of it. The customer gets branding that will stay with the customers.
Lume is continuing to create cutting edge multisensory dining experiences, starting to work with augmented reality.
All of the experiences have the foundation of Chef Quade and the team creating amazing food. We will talk to Chef Quade in a future podcast about his journey and his approach to restaurant creativity and innovation.
We look at Domino's Pizza. They are a great example of a successful online ordering businesses. The complete directly against Menulog / Just Eat / Delivery Hero and Grubhub. They put a lot of work into their online ordering solution, because they need to differentiate themselves from other online ordering solutions.
We look at the prices between 2 orders, one for take out and one for delivery. Domino's have no minimum order value. We look at Domino's delivery fees and analyse the delivery fee. They have marked up their food by 48% for the convenience of having it delivered. This is a massive charge and something that a lot of people don't really want to deliver the pizza. They are driving people to pick up the pizza. Why is this?
Domino's is set up for high volume pizza creation. The bottleneck is now the synchronisation of pizza cooking with delivery, which is expensive, so they drive people to pick up.
The Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering system now feeds into our Free Restaurant CRM system.
We talk about the importance of using your email database to turn new customers into repeat customers. This is the simplest way to increase repeat customer orders.
We look at how the numbers stack up to increase your revenue by $144,000 a year with a simple monthly program shaping customers to buy from you at least monthly.
Many customers with online ordering will spend $5,00 or $10,000 with their favourite restaurant, but most restaurants aren't able to identify who their regular customers are.
We talk about the kind of offerings and emails that you can send to drive demand and we also look yield utilisation. How can you move demand from Saturday through to Wednesday when the kitchen is quieter.
We also talk about some of the Facebook campaigns that you can run. We have some customers who are running very effective Facebook campaigns to drive online order revenue. Even better, those using FROLO can directly see the number of orders that have come in from a Facebook campaign, which means that you can scale your marketing because you know that it is working.
We look at the number of customers who still like to make a call to place their order. Restaurant aggregators like grubhub and Just Eat don't publish phone numbers because they don't get to charge commission for orders placed over the phone. We are still seeing a lot of orders being done over the phone, so including the phone number can make a big difference in the success of the campaign.
We look at the increase in orders that you can see by offering your own loyalty campaign for online orders. This is a highly effective way of increasing your customers orders.
Some of your take out customers could be worth more than $4,000 a year, so it is really important that you work as hard as possible to not only find those new customers, but to turn them into repeat customers.
If you are looking for ways to increase order frequency and value, take payments online and get paid in 3 days and to build your email database, not someone else's, check out the Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering system.
Online ordering is a really important part of the revenue mix for some restaurants.
This is the first part of a 2 part podcast on the economics of online ordering and how small restaurants are dramatically increasing profitability with a few simple tweaks.
Menulog, Just Eat, Grub Hub and Delivery Hero are charging 13% commission and not giving the restaurants the email addresses, so it is very difficult to build a sustainable take out business with those platforms.
We look at why restaurants do take out. Often the bottle neck for a restaurant is the number of tables in a restaurant and the number of times you turn those tables. Take out moves spare capacity in your kitchen past the bottleneck of the tables that you have, allowing for significantly higher revenue if you have a big mismatch between kitchen capability and in house consumption.
We discuss the profitability of take out orders. There is very little front of house costs associated and Restaurants used to offer a 10% discount for take out orders to reflect the decreased costs associated with take out, but increased commissions from Online Ordering companies have seen these offers all but disappear. (They are starting to come back as restaurants move to commission free platforms.)
What problem do you solve with in your restaurant? Take out offers convenience, the ability to have a few drinks without worrying about an Uber home. For us, take out allows us to Netflix and Chill, rather than the issues associated with going out. It offers flexibility and convenience, and it dramatically opens up your target market when you offer take out.
One of the big things that Uber has done is that they have increased the calibre of restaurants that are now offering take out, with customers now increasing the amount of take out that they are eating, which goes hand in hand with the increasing number of customers who are time poor.
What are the problems with Take Out? For delivery, the synchronisation of getting meals out of the kitchen becomes a lot more complicated because rather than relying on front of house to get the meal to the table, now a delivery driver needs to be organised and synchronised with the food coming out of the kitchen to get it to the customer in a reasonable time.
Using UberEATS removes some of the logistics issues, but it also means that you are losing 35% of revenue as well as not getting the customers email address.
We look at some of the statistics around Online Orders. We discuss the average order value and anecdotally, Thai has a lower average order value than Indian.
The spread of the number of orders that a restaurant takes is incredible. Some restaurants take 1 order a week. Some are doing $2,000 - $3,000 a week! This means that some restaurants have an extra $150,000 a year in revenue. If they are using a delivery service that charges, they may be paying $20,000 a year in commission and NOT getting any of their customers email addresses.
We have some restaurants saving over $1,000 a month in commissions using the Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering system.
What is the product that you offer through take out? Often the menu is exactly the same as the dine-in menu without any thought to the issues with delivery. How is it packaged? What can you do to make a better experience for your customers when they unpack their food. What branding do you do for your restaurant?
Do you have online ordering online specials?
We look at how Qantas uses online only specials to drive passengers to pre-order their meals. It makes it easier for them to cater for everyone. They offer online only special meals, which are using pretty epic - this drives people to pre order, meaning they have a much better idea of the number of meals that they will need for each flight. Remember, they can't just go out to the supermarket and pick up a couple of extra steaks when they are at 30,000 feet.
How are you driving phone orders? Companies like Menulog, Just Eat and Delivery Hero will not publish your phone number because they don't want any phone orders because they don't make any commission on it, but there are still a lot of people who want to order over the phone.
Are you running "Order direct from the Restaurant and save!" campaigns. These can be very effective for local restaurants.
We discuss Giodana's Pizza and their Deep Dish Pie and how it is almost the perfect product for Restaurant delivery.
We talk about Sam Panopoulos and the international storm he created by throwing some pineapple on a pizza.
In the next episode we will look at Domino's Pizza and the economics underlying the way they cost their menu.
If you are looking to increase your online orders, if you want an email database of your customers who order from you, try using the Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering system. It's free, supports printing dockets, feeds into our Free Restaurant CRM system and processes payments in just 3 days. This is one of our most popular products with restaurants saving thousands of every month in commission. Not only do we have a platform for taking orders commission free, we have a process for building your online ordering business.
This special podcast covers the first two days from the National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago. The show is absolutely massive and after 2 days we have only down 2/3s of the show. There are show many people to talk to, some many ideas to explore and some much food to sample :).
We've gone looking for the best ideas to improve profitability in your restaurant, so we are looking at the people, the places, the processes, the product and the produce that is at the show.
People: Their are coaches, some who have some great systems to help Restaurants and Bars to run a lot more efficiently, we talk to the guys from Grub Hub and
Products: We look at some massive copper beer mugs from Barbarian brands.
Produce: There are some great new products at the show. Aerated kombucha tea, and we look at the difference between Chilean Sea Bass and Patagonian Tooth fish. A lot of the produce has a really interesting story behind it and when distributors are trying to sell it to you, they tell that story, but too often that story gets forgotten in what you tell your customers about the produce. How can you better tell the stories of the items on your menu, or should you get produce with better stories?
There is plenty more that we talk about and we will be sharing more of the things we've learned in future episodes.
We end with a great experiential dining concept, the Saved by the Max popup Restaurant, based on the 80's show, Saved by the bell.
This special podcast covers the first two days from the National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago. The show is absolutely massive and after 2 days we have only down 2/3s of the show. There are show many people to talk to, some many ideas to explore and some much food to sample :).
We've gone looking for the best ideas to improve profitability in your restaurant, so we are looking at the people, the places, the processes, the product and the produce that is at the show.
People: Their are coaches, some who have some great systems to help Restaurants and Bars to run a lot more efficiently, we talk to the guys from Grub Hub and
Products: We look at some massive copper beer mugs from Barbarian brands.
Produce: There are some great new products at the show. Aerated kombucha tea, and we look at the difference between Chilean Sea Bass and Patagonian Tooth fish. A lot of the produce has a really interesting story behind it and when distributors are trying to sell it to you, they tell that story, but too often that story gets forgotten in what you tell your customers about the produce. How can you better tell the stories of the items on your menu, or should you get produce with better stories?
There is plenty more that we talk about and we will be sharing more of the things we've learned in future episodes.
We end with a great experiential dining concept, the Saved by the Max popup Restaurant, based on the 80's show, Saved by the bell.
Described as the Iron Lady of Hong Kong Private Dining, we talk to Grace Choy.
We talk about the our Comparison Research between Dimmi, Quandoo, OpenTable, Tock, Obee and the Free Online Restaurant Booking System. We think that email sharing
Grace is very humble, but her passion for cooking shows through in the videos that she produces and that has enabled to build up the largest Facebook following of any Chinese Restaurant on Facebook.
Grace has an amazing social media following:
She has 41,871 followers on Linkedin and 431,703 followers on Facebook.
The important lessons from Grace are:
1. The power of Facebook Videos; and
2. The power of using Facebook Video to show your passion.
Grace is very passionate about her cooking and that shows through in the way that she comes across on the videos. It is so important to be yourself and do things that you are passionate about, and Grace does that very well.
Grace manages her own Facebook, and responds to everyone on the Facebook page.
Her 20 seat Restaurant is booked out 2 weeks in advance. She focueses on fresh food and treating people as family. She also has pre bookings to cut down on no shows.
Grace was the first Twitter Verified Chef's in Greater China, even though she has only tweeted 68 times! and now has 21,500 followers on Twitter.
Her Facebook following has been the basis for a large amount of free PR that Grace has received, including a short Youtube Video that tells her story.
Chef Ana Ros along with here husband owns Hisa Franko, a fine dining Restaurant in Slovenia.
Ana's story is truly inspiring, she never received a a classical training, but has developed her own style and techniques and her determination has seen her been recognised amongst the World's best Chefs.
Not originally planning a career as a Chef, she meet her husband whose parents owned Hisa Franko. He was a trained Sommelier and when his parents handed the reins of the Restaurant to him, Ana stepped into the kitchen.
Her determination to succeed saw her learn the techniques of a chef, learn how to manage a team and how to run the Restaurant. We talk about the earlier years and how she was able to build her repertoire of techniques in the kitchen, the process she went through build her skills.
We also look at the process she takes to create a new dish, and the way that she is not only integrating local produce into the menu, but working to build the supply chain to enable local commerce and to showcase the amazing ingredients that she is able to source from around Hisa Franko.
This year she was Voted the World's Best Female Chef.
We met our friends from the Dimmi and discussed some of the issues with the aggregator model as opposed to those who want to tell the story of their own Restaurant.
Many Restaurants are taking control of their marketing and their story and using the Free Online Restaurant Booking System and the Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering system.
We talk about our plans to help a Restaurant that is kicking in $10,000 a month to keep their Restaurant going and how we are going to help them.
Congratulations to 11 Madison Park, the World's Best Restaurant for 2017.
We discuss why you may not want to be in the World's 50 Best, but you may want to be the best parent to your kids, and how your Restaurant needs to support that.
Have a listen to Chef's Table on Netflix, a great series telling amazing stories of these amazing Chefs.
Super excited that we are going to the 2017 NRA Show in Chicago. It is one of the best educational opportunities for Restaurant owners and chefs to learn and get inspiration on how to better run their restaurant and/or kitchen.
In this Secret Sauce we talk about attracting tourist customers. A lot of towns get a lot of tourists, but they tend to go to a very small number of Restaurants. Are you getting your fair share of the Tourists in your area? If not, we will discuss lots of ideas to help you find more tourist customer and turn them into repeat customers.
Websites are even more important in Tourist areas. Make sure that it is:
- Optimised for Google Search;
- Optimised for mobile (most of your customers will be on mobiles);
- Links with Google Maps - your Google My Business account, (think about how people can get to your Restaurant); and
- Have a signature dish on the front page.
If you need help with your Restaurant Website, talk to the M4R team, we have packages starting from $995 to help you start getting more customers.
Facebook ads can run very differently in tourist towns, making it a lot easier to use Facebook, make sure you listen to our Facebook ads in tourist towns run down.
Have you worked with the local Concierges, Hotels, Tour Operators, and airport tourism guides?
We have a discussion about the issues with Tripadvisor and Yelp and some of your options for dealing with them. Do you actively manage them, ignore them, build your own channel for customers?
We talk about Trip Guides and some ideas about how to be listed in those Top 10 things to do in YOUR TOWN.
We look at Lonely Planet and the effect that it had for Ferg Burger.
What is your signature dish, does it fit in with your tourist message and how are you marketing it?
Skyline Restaurant
What can you sell? T-Shirts, sauces? Part of something to take home for the tourists?
Seasonality is always an issue, so we talk about building a database and focusing on locals for the quiet times. You will have your regulars, even if it is only every two years.
Leave a review, hit us up on Facebook, and Linkedin.
Let us know if you are going to the NRA show!!
Many of the problems in Restaurants that we see come down to issues with Leadership. Restaurant Leadership is something that isn't taught, most people pick it up on the job, so we will go through some tools to help with your Restaurant Leadership.
What is the definition of Leadership and in particular Restaurant Leadership.
Restaurant Autoposy. One of the Restaurants using our Free Online Restaurant Booking System has closed. We go through the issues that they had. The biggest issue was that even though they weren't busy and wanted to be better, and it was quiet on Saturday nights, they did no marketing. Even worse, the website was very poor, no great photos, no SEO (getting found in Google). There web traffic dropped from 750 a month down to 600 over the last 18 months. These is less than half of what their competitors were getting. It probably equated to $10,000 a month in revenue that they were missing out on. I wonder what was going on in the minds of the people in the team there, doing nothing to find more customers. The only marketing they did was Groupon at the end.
We talk about what Leadership is and look at Dwight D Eisenhower's definition of Leadership, which is "Getting people to do what you want them to do, because they want to do it"
How does Restaurant Leadership work in a Restaurant? There is the typical angry chef, but I think it is a lot more common to have no Leadership in the Restaurant.
We look at the mindset that people need to be able to be an effective Leader in your Restaurant.
Make sure that your Personal Plan aligns with your Business Plan which aligns with your Marketing Plan. Too many people forget why they opened their Restaurant and they lose their passion for their Restaurant. It is so much harder to motivate people if you aren't motivated and passionate about what you are doing.
We look at BHAGs (big Hairy Audacious Goals), and we talk about Missions, Values and Goals and how these are tools to help you be a better leader, but also the big component of the business that you are responsible.
We talk about Adam Sobel's Vision from Cinnamon Snail and Nick Sarillo's Nick's Pizza and Pub. Check out Nick's book, "A Slice of the Pie."
Nick’s Pizza & Pub Values- We treat everyone with dignity and respect.
- We are dedicated to the learning, teaching, and ongoing development of each other.
- We have fun while we work!
- We provide a clean and safe environment for our guests and team members.
- We honor individual passions, and creativity at work and at home.
- We communicate openly, clearly and honestly.
- We honor the relationships that connect our team, our guests and community.
- We take pride in our commitment to provide quality service and a quality product.
- We celebrate and reward accomplishments and “A+” players.
- We support balance between home and work.
- Health: We are a profitable and fiscally responsible company. We support the physical and emotional well-being of our guests and team members.
- Our team works through support and cooperation.
We look at the E-Myth and how it can help you delegate.
How can you be a better communicator in your business.
We also look at Danny Meyers "Setting the Table" as well, another great book on the topic of leadership.
- Have a personal plan
- Be passionate
- Define your values
- Hire for values and train for skills
- Procedures
- Delegate
- Communicate, Communicate and Communicate
- Find a mentor.
The journey of leadership is never ending, but remember - The better you get, the better you get.
The talk to Ivan Brewer from Restaurantology.
We talk about a Restaurant using a Qandoo website and the issues that poor SEO and not having a marketing strategy is really hurting 1 Restaurant and Sydney and another that is taking over $100,000 a year in online orders and how they are saving $13,000 a year by not paying commission on their online orders. We talk about how much you should be paying for online Facebook campaign budgets for your Restaurant.
It is a sad fact that 50% of restaurants fail within 4 years and only make 2% in profit.
The biggest Restaurant profitability mistakes that people make when running a restaurant?
High Rent as a % of revenue may not correlate to high foot traffic. If it was high, there should be more sales.
How does Labour costs relate to rent and cost of goods sold. How many staff do I really need?
We discuss restaurant productivity and ways to increase it.
Discretionary effort. The more we engage our staff the higher the productivity of the staff. Listen to your staff and their ideas.
Creating a vision and a story that your team can sell, eg
The KPIs for a restaurant business viability test - % fixed costs / % variable costs.
Fixed costs like - Accounting, Rent, Variable can be things like linen and gas.
COGS should be pretty consistent with a weekly stocktake and weekly P+L.
What is the labour %?
Understand the key distribution of costs and be able to adjust in real time. How can you influence the time spent in the kitchen with pricing. How do you avoid bottlenecks in the kitchen during peak hours.
You should have a costed roster. The dollar spend on a daily basis.
How can the distribution of the restaurant across the week. Should we discount in the quiet times or charge a premium for the busy times.
How does the pricing of the bar work and what opportunities are there to increase revenue and profit from bar revenue. Why should you discount on the bar, rather than in the kitchen?
What is restaurant sales velocity and how do you influence it?
Try rostering by 15 minute increments.
We discuss a lot of advanced way to think about the profit and loss and how you can influence how much of the revenue flows to the bottom line.
If you haven't signed up yet, check out the 5 Minute a day Restaurant Marketing MBA. It's totally free.
The talk to Ivan Brewer from Restaurantology.
We talk about a Restaurant using a Qandoo website and the issues that poor SEO and not having a marketing strategy is really hurting 1 Restaurant and Sydney and another that is taking over $100,000 a year in online orders and how they are saving $13,000 a year by not paying commission on their online orders. We talk about how much you should be paying for online Facebook campaign budgets for your Restaurant.
It is a sad fact that 50% of restaurants fail within 4 years and only make 2% in profit.
The biggest Restaurant profitability mistakes that people make when running a restaurant?
High Rent as a % of revenue may not correlate to high foot traffic. If it was high, there should be more sales.
How does Labour costs relate to rent and cost of goods sold. How many staff do I really need?
We discuss restaurant productivity and ways to increase it.
Discretionary effort. The more we engage our staff the higher the productivity of the staff. Listen to your staff and their ideas.
Creating a vision and a story that your team can sell, eg
The KPIs for a restaurant business viability test - % fixed costs / % variable costs.
Fixed costs like - Accounting, Rent, Variable can be things like linen and gas.
COGS should be pretty consistent with a weekly stocktake and weekly P+L.
What is the labour %?
Understand the key distribution of costs and be able to adjust in real time. How can you influence the time spent in the kitchen with pricing. How do you avoid bottlenecks in the kitchen during peak hours.
You should have a costed roster. The dollar spend on a daily basis.
How can the distribution of the restaurant across the week. Should we discount in the quiet times or charge a premium for the busy times.
How does the pricing of the bar work and what opportunities are there to increase revenue and profit from bar revenue. Why should you discount on the bar, rather than in the kitchen?
What is restaurant sales velocity and how do you influence it?
Try rostering by 15 minute increments.
We discuss a lot of advanced way to think about the profit and loss and how you can influence how much of the revenue flows to the bottom line.
If you haven't signed up yet, check out the 5 Minute a day Restaurant Marketing MBA. It's totally free.
Make sure you check out the Restaurant Innovation podcast. This is our most popular podcast this so far this year and it goes into the processes that can help you be more productive in your Restaurant.
In this podcast, we talk to Robbie Doyle from Buy Grow Sell a Business.
Robbie has been a chef for 25 years and a Real Estate agent specialising in hospitality for 10 years.
He tells some sad stories of Restaurant purchases gone bad and people who have lost their homes in when their Restaurant business has gone broke.
What are the right and wrong motivations for buying a restaurant?
What are the big 5 mistakes that people make when buying a Restaurant?
Where are the best buying opportunities to buy a Restaurant?
What discuss Robbie's thoughts on fitout costs?
What role do systems play in Restaurant success? Should you buy a systematised restaurant or not?
How do the successful people flip Restaurants? What is the process they go through?
What are the general rules of thumb for metrics on sale price?
What bargains are out there and should you be looking for the bargain, or are the bargains bargains for good reason?
We now have customers in Singapore and the Czech Republic! Hooray.
The times, they are a changing. Customers are changing, tastes are changing, dining experiences are changing, competition is changing and the players in the industry are changing.
I was surprised to see the number of people who are still advertising in the Yellow Pages. The budgets that people are spending is amazing, when you think of the returns that you would get if you were spending that money online. We discuss the 7 best uses for the Yellow Pages in 2017.
The online startup space has innovation built in, but the imperative to innovative is a lot more insidious. The lack of pressure to innovate means that Restaurants often slowly decline in their Restaurant as customers needs change.
The rise of Delivery services, pre prepared food, Booking aggregators are all changing the restaurant business.
What kind of person is better at innovation and how can you use that to help your team innovate.
What kind of activities can help you with innovation. How can you change your habits and routines to increase your opportunities to innovate.
We look at how different actions, people and activities. I've started playing the drums and going to art galleries to change the way I think and the ideas that I am having. Without that external stimulas, it is very difficult for your to come up with different ideas.
How did Massimo Bottera develop the ability to fuse art and his culinary techniques to create the dishes that lead to Osteria Francescana.
We discuss business model innovation and menu innovation.
The Business Model.
We discuss how taking ideas from different industries can make a big difference in your industry. Plus or minus 10% everyone else in your industry is doing the same as you. In other industries, there may be much better results.
The Business Model Canvas covers:
- Key Partners
- Key Activities
- Value Proposition
- Key Resources
- Cost Structure
- Revenue Streams
- Channels
- Customer Segments
- Customer Relationships
Menu Innovation
You take take existing products and techniques and fuse them together or your can take an object or concept and recreate it in food. We look at the Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit.
We look at the work of Grant Achatz and his Apple Taffy and how it brings back childhood memories which are a fundamental part of the attraction of the menu item.
How can you recreate a menu with different items, maybe cheaper items.
We discuss failure and why it is important to embrace failure as a part of the innovation process.
Wolfgang Puck has said that he has opened a lot of successful Restaurants, but he has learnt the most about the restaurants that failed.
Facebook Marketing - We look at the Facebook Marketing Report Card for Australia, and very few Restaurants are doing any Facebook marketing. This is a huge opportunity for most restaurants.
Annual event marketing - We discuss a Restaurant that made a Meat Pie Burger for Australia Day. Sounds pretty ordinary, but it is an Aussie thing. A great idea that got them mentioned in news.com.au.
We look at how you to run a Facebook Live Video for your Restaurant.
Check out the Facebook Live Map, to get some ideas of the kind of streaming that people are doing.
Equipment -
Here are the makers of the phone holder that I use - Arkon.
Bright lights - we bought some cheapies of eBay.
Your phone - Android or iPhone. It doesn't really matter, both do an excellent job.
A couple of tips - Rehearse, plan, and start with something exciting because the video will appear silent. People need to engage with the video to be able to hear the video.
Pick somewhere quiet, make sure you have a good phone signal.
Be authentic - this is a great way to build your personal brand.
Types of content you can use in your Facebook Live Videos:
- Food going over the pass
- Food prep - tell the story of how you create your dishes
- Sourcing the food - video from your garden, the market
- Use it to do market research - what items do people want to see on your menu?
- Go through a recipe
Aangan at Footscray prepare their own spices, that is a perfect type of video for Facebook Live.
We then discuss some ideas on how to best run an ad to your Facebook Live Video.
Tag us in on your Facebook Live videos.
Connect with us on Linkedin to keep up to date with the latest Restaurant Marketing ideas.
In this episode we discuss our Restaurant Facebook Marketing Report. Less than 1% of Restaurants that we surveyed ran ads in the time. A shocking statistic when you think that it is one of the easiest ways to increase revenue for your Restaurant!
We know that Restaurants aren't super interested in Facebook marketing. The previous advanced Facebook marketing episodes haven't been downloaded as much as some of the others (Reasons Restaurants Fail was downloaded a lot more - maybe something to that :( ) But it is really important if you want to be successful to understand Facebook. Even if you don't do it, your competitors will be and you need to know what is possible.
This episodes looks at using your email database to create a customer audience in Facebook to target your Restaurant customers.
We also look at budgetting. How much should you spend per day on a Facebook campaign. We look at the cost per 1000 impressions and also the cost per link click or engagement and give you some rough guidelines.
We also go into what the cost of your campaign tells you about your audience reaction.
If you want more information on Facebook marketing - check out the legends at Perpetual Traffic. Keith, Molly and Ralph delve deep, really deep into Facebook marketing. This isn't for the faint hearted, but it is a great podcast if you want to crush Facebook marketing for your Restaurant.
We talk about Delivery Hero exiting Australia, and look at the implications for Restaurants who are doing
We talked about the amazing technical expertise and innovation at Lume Restaurant. Rated by Gault and Millau as the number 1 Restaurant in Australia, and amazing experience with some great technology, including the Tock booking system which has allowed them to cut no shows to virtually zero.
This episode covers process for creating an annual marketing plan.
1. Review you monthly, weekly, daily and hourly revenue. What are the quiet times and when are the busy times. This helps you understand what work needs to be done to increase the profitability over the year.
2. What holidays are there in your country?
3. We go over the List of International Observances. Got a quite period with no public holidays? Look at this list and there are bound be to a few days around them that you can run a campaign around. We look at some of the days that you can run marketing campaigns around.
4. Look at your seasonal menu that you want to run.
5. Start looking at partnerships that you can run to avoid the troughs in revenue.
6. Look at targeting customers for each hour that your Restaurant is open. Look at variable pricing throughout the day and week to maximise yield.
Have a think about how you are growing your email marketing database and the events that you can use to market to that list.
We look at how your planning can help with your goal setting.
Technology and competition is dramatically changing the way that Restaurants operate. We look at how these 2 mega trends are creating the 7 big trends for 2017 for Restaurant owners and chefs.
We have identified 7 major trends that will change the Restaurant industry in 2017.
1. Restaurant Home Delivery - there has been consolidation with the online ordering companies like Just Eat and Delivery Hero, and new entrants like UrberEats providing delivery for Restaurants who would have never thought of doing delivery 12 months ago. On top of this - we have Drones and Self Driving Cars - this technology is going to provide a lot of opportunities for Restaurant Owners.
2. Marketing - It is becoming really hard now to not have a strong marketing strategy for your Restaurant, along with great execution. You don't want to have the best restaurant that no one has ever heard of - because it is increasingly likely that you will go out of business if you do.
3. Bigger Data for Small Restaurants - using Facebook and Comparative Analytics are a powerful way to use big data for small Restaurants.
4. Automation - the rise of the Restaurant Robots. Rising wages and increasing costs are meaning that more Restaurant owners will turn to automation to cut costs.
5. Consolidation - For a small restaurant, going to 1 Restaurant to 2 is the hardest move, but it starts you on the path to get those economies of scale.
6. Specialization - It is becoming increasingly difficult to run a generic cuisine based restaurant. Many Indian or Chinese restaurants are struggling unless they are starting to specialize and give customers a reason to be loyal to them. We look at some of the areas that Restaurants are going to be moving into.
7. Divergence - Restaurants that have their strategy in the middle of the profit mix will struggle - they will either be pushed to build a Restaurant built around low price, or specializing to create value in niches. Being a good restaurant with nothing specific will force you to start competing on price and that will make it harder for you to retain your quality.
If you want to read about the changes, check out our in depth report on the Restaurant Trends for 2017.
For your Restaurant to prosper in 2017, you need to be educated. Check out our best Restaurant podcasts of 2016. There are 19 must listen to podcasts from the thought leaders of the Restaurant Industry.
Look at the free tools to market your Restaurant and start to differentiate your Restaurant from your competitors.
We look at Living Social being bought by Groupon. This is a good thing because there is now 1 less daily deals company. For a lot of Restaurants, daily deals are a very dangerous process, and often a symptom
We talk about an $8.38 marketing campaign that filled a cafe in Western Australia with customers buying their highest margin item. We go through the process so you can run the exact same campaign!
We talk about the formula for making a Restaurant Profitable. This is a very simple formula and used in lots of different types of business, but we will go through what it looks like for your Restaurant.
Leads x Conversion Rate = Customers
Customers x Average number of Transaction x Average Sale Amount = Revenue.
Revenue x Profit Margin = Profit
We discuss all of the ways that you can effect each of these numbers.
This is a great discussion about how some of our customers are making a really big difference in the profitability of their Restaurant.
We talk about using Prisma, a new and exciting app available on Android and Chrome to help you create very sharable content for solution media.
Building a free CRM System
What is a CRM system, what is CRM - a process for building information about your customers and leads, and your relationships with the customer
The goals of your CRM system should be:.
Your new CRM System needs to be very cost effective, very time effective and very simple to use. We look at the parts that make up a CRM system and then, how we build a free Restaurant CRM system
Gather information about your customers. Purchases, bookings, , frequency, recency,birthdays, preferences
Free Restaurant Online Ordering System, and the Free Online Restaurant Booking System.
Big data for your Restaurant. Every Monday we benchmark every one of our customers against other Restaurants. so you know if you are doing great and you have some ideas about how to improve if not.
Creating a unified view of customer information across bookings and orders.
Should be electronic. Called yesterday, had to call back. She didn't ask for my name. Only 3 tables in the Restaurant. 75% is take away. Online ordering service that is charging 12%. 75% of revenue taxed at 12% and not getting
If you are taking bookings or orders and not collecting emails, you are wasting a huge opportunity.
Mailchimp free for 2,00 contacts . Many of our customers are using that.
Facebook ads, upload mobile numbers or email addresses.
Adam Sobel is the Chef behind the amazing food and business at Cinnamon Snail.
Cinnamon Snail has food trucks and restaurants in New York and New Jersey. Adam is passionate about changing the world to vegan organic and he works to do that by creating vegan organic dishes that people want to eat because they are creative, playful and great tasting. This allows him to dramatically increase his target market - but also help educate people that vegan organic food doesn't have to be boring. We talk to Adam about how he can to find his passion and how it is a central part of Cinnamon Snail today.
Adam has done a great job of his menu engineering. He has created some great looking dishes that attract long lines for his food trucks. The menu is a critical part of why Adam does what he does, and it shows through in his mission and vision and the culture that he has created with the people he works with at Cinnamon Snail.
Check out his website for a better idea of the great food that he is creating.
Adam has a great story too about some serendipity that helped him get his first cook book published. Once again, it comes down to having great tasting food.
Adam has some amazing videos for Cinnamon Snail. Check out:
We look at the power of Big Data for Small Restaurants and some of the tools that you can use to understand how your online marketing is working in your business. As an example, we look at some data from Sensis about how many people go to their average business website. Without some big data, the information that you get about your website visits is not very useful, but with some comparative analytics and big data, you can really understand how your website is performing and more importantly, how your online marketing is contributing to your revenue and your profits.
We have a quick look at generating repeat customers and word of mouth and why it can be so important for your marketing.
Facebook Retargeting
We look at what retargeting or remarketing is and why it is so important for you.
These are really simple campaigns to run and can be the most effective campaigns that you can run. Many of the remarketing campaigns that we run for Restaurants are running at $5 per day.
We talk about how to set it up on your website and the process to be able to integrate Facebook retargeting on your website.
We talk about Corporate Hospitality and how remarketing can increase your Corporate customers (these ones spend the most money and often run events on Tuesday and Wednesday nights - maybe your quietest nights.
We talk about Canva as well, a really powerful free tool for creating great images for your Facebook marketing campaigns.
We talk about our new Marketing Metrics dashboard, providing detailed information about customers, orders, bookings and Facebook.
We look at the Facebook ad grid, with Avatars and Benefits. Who are the customers that you are looking for in your area. If you think it is people who like your cuisine in your local area, you need to be a lot more granular to create marketing campaigns that really resonate with your customers. This is breaking down your customer base into the specific niches.
We talk about Duncan Robertson from Duncan's Thai Kitchen.
We go into the Avatars that we created for Rooster Burgers, our test Restaurant and discuss some of the benefits that we would provide those customers.
We talk about some of the ideas to come up with innovative marketing campaigns that can dramatically increase the number of customers that they bring in, along with the segmentation options that are available in Facebook. Plenty of interesting options that can really help you target new customers very effectively.
We look at how to take great photos for your Restaurant, quickly and easily that will help your create killer marketing campaigns and also be great content for your website.
We look at the steps that you need to take to create a quick and dirty Facebook marketing campaign to get an injection of cash for when money is tight.
First, we look at the new Loyalty discounts feature in our Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering system.
We look at the first Michelin Starred street food hawker. His commitment to excellence is a really inspiring storing. Have a quick look at the video.
What is the photo that you are going to use? We talk about the cheapest way to get a decent photo of the food you need for emergency Facebook marketing.
What is the offer you should use and who will you targeting with it? We look at some interesting targeting options that can work well with different types of offers.
How much should you spend in your Facebook Marketing campaign.
What are the best times to run the ads?
We also look at how to measure how well it has worked.
We look at the reasons why restaurants fail. To many Restaurants close, but we aren't talking about that kind of failure. We are talking about the Restaurant owner or chef who don't have a Restaurant that is meeting the requirements of their personal plan.
- They are working too many hours.
- They aren't making enough money.
- They don't spend enough time with their family.
- They can't take time out from the Restaurant for a holiday.
That isn't good enough. Running a small business is hard and stressful and running a Restaurant is one of the hardest and most stressful types of businesses. Let's look at ways that can cause failure and ways that you can avoid failure and start being successful.
1. Cashflow, leases, cashflow, understanding the P+L and the profitability hospitality metrics that you need to focus on.
2. How to be objective about your Restaurant. How can you use open and objective information about your restaurant to make it better.
3. Lack of innovation. There are so many things that can be done in the Restaurant, POS systems, marketing, ingredients, Menu. If you aren't continually innovating, you will appear dated when compared to Restaurants uses the latest techniques and technologies.
4. Fitout. What is the ROI of the fitout?
5. Poor marketing.
6. No marketing.
7. Poor Culture. Culture is a soft topic, it isn't reported in the P+L, so a lot of the time it doesn't get the attention that it deserves. It impacts you, your team and your customers.
8. Menu Engineering. We look at some great Menu Engineering ideas and how it works in a real Restaurant, like www.noisyoyster.com.au, where the menu is costed, the wait staff know wait to recommend.
9. Poor or no concept or Restaurant USP.
10. Burn out. It is a really tough game. It takes a toll. What can you do to get the spark back and the passion that will shine through in bring the customers back in?
We talk about Pokemon Go and why it is a signpost to one of the fundamental changes that is occurring for small businesses and Restaurants in particular. Some Restaurants are crushing this change and others are ignoring it at their peril.
Chicken Vindaloo Dim sims. Just saying.....
We look at some great tips to help you increase personal productivity and the way that you work so that you
Look at the activities that you are spending time on, delegate, create procedures, hiring, multitasking the right way, automating systems, look after yourself with sleep and exercise, and last but not least - marketing :).
Check out Confluence for a way to store your policies and procedures.
Check out Eric Cacciatore's Restaurant Unstoppable podcast.
Xero - cloud based accounting system that can cut the time you spend on accounting.
Too many Restaurant owners work too many hours for too little reward - starting to work on your business is the start of making the change to the type of Hospitality business that you want to run, so you should find some ideas to be able to get that 1 hour. You will find that 1 hour on the business will return to you many hours of time saved down the track and you can use that extra time to continue to work on the business and then you are on the track to build the great profitable hospitality business. :)
Have a busy day!
Profitable Hospitality is the goal of all Restaurant owners, but it can be very hard to achieve. We look at 7 areas that Restaurant, Cafe and Take Out owners can impact profitability and we look at ways that you can improve profitability in each of the areas.
1. Your business plan and the sample P+L. What are the KPIs that you need to be looking at to achieve profitability.
2. Your Marketing Plan.
3. Hiring and training. How much money are you wasting on bad hiring practices and how many great employees leave your Restaurant because it isn't a great place to work. We will cover one great tip we have used to find the great employees, which is very cheap to use! We talk about how Nick Sarillo builds a great Restaurant culture.
4. Wage costs. How do you look at your wage costs?
5. Rent. We cover an interesting way to look at your rent and 1 way that may help you save a little rent per month.
6. Managing your food and bev costs. What is the number 1 way to decrease your food costs without decreasing the quality of your food? Why not use some of the food costing tools from Sysco?
7. Menu Engineering. What is the process for Menu Engineering and how should you do that? What is the number one most profitable phrase in Restaurant Marketing and are you using it?
8. What is the 8th item of our list of the Top 7 things to do to increase your Restaurant Profitability? You'll have to listen to the podcast to find out :)
We look at Big Huey's Diner, their awesome menu and some of the great things that they are doing to increase profitability in their restaurant.
We look at USPs - Unique Selling Propositions.
Does your Restaurant need a Unique Selling Proposition, because not every restaurant really needs one.
What should a Unique Selling Proposition do for your Restaurant?
What is the process to create a Unique Selling Proposition?
Qualtiy price, product
We go through some sample USPs and how they work.
Mentioned in this podcast:
Norman Hotel - Brisbane's Worst Vegetarian Restaurant.
New Managing Director for Menulog - Commissions to increase?
The 2016 NRA Show in Chiacgo was attended by over 45,000 people.
We spent 3 packed days looking for the best products, ideas and inspiration to help you grow your business. There was so much to see - but here are some of the edited highlights.
We visit 2 great Chicago restaurants - Nick's Pizza and Pub and Au Cheval with Eric Cacciatore from Restaurant Unstoppable.
We finally get to experience the amazing In n Out Burger - the iconic Burger business.
What was the surprising thing about Bubba Gump?
We discuss some of the reason YOU should go to the NRA show and how it will help you grow your business.
There are a lot of suppliers who have a great story - that story can and should become part of your story. It helps create the experience and where there is experience there's margin!
We discuss Kimbal Musk from The Kitchen and the way he creates a great story about his suppliers, Denny Post and the importance of a Signature meal- even if it isn't that popular, as well as a great discussion between Jon Taffer from Bar Rescue and Robert Irvine from Restaurant Impossible.
Are you doing coffee in your Restaurant? Is it great coffee? What impact would making your restaurant someone's regular coffee spot make to revenue? We talked to the team from Vittoria coffee. (It was easily the best coffee at the show!)
The Urban Cultivators look great and if you are creating a fresh and green brand, these are perfect for really highlighting what it is that you are doing for your customers (and how much of a difference would cheap, fresh herbs make?)
Why was it we visited the Aussie Pie Kitchen in LA?
We also look at Torta Bianca - a great ingredient for your cocktail list.
We finish of with esoteric wine varietals and how they can help you with your wine list and profits and lastly a warning about spending the wrong way with your social media marketing.
These are ujust some of the examples of what we picked up from the show. If you have an idea for a restaurant in mind, or already have a concept, there are hundreds of ideas and products there that you can find to help to tell a better story, find productivity gains or increase margin with better and more interesting menu items.
I have focused too much on productivity, because I am not very good in the kitchen, but I think there was just as many interesting products for HOW you do in the kitchen as there was for WHAT you do in the kitchen.
Hope to see you at #NRA 2017 and hope you have a busy night tonight!
For many Restaurants, the website is the central part
We talk about how to compare the traffic for your website against other Restaurant's websites, so you know how well your online marketing is performing.
Find out how to make sure that the website is optimised for mobile.
How often you are updating the website? You should be able to make changes on your website yourself, so you can do it frequently without being charged by your web developer every time you make a change.
A quick and easy way to grow your email marketing database and how that works with your website traffic.
How integrating with Facebook can help drive traffic and customers to your website.
Using www.canva.com to create great content.
What can Instagram do for your website traffic?
Making sure you capitalise on all of the great Public Relations mentions that you get.
Have a listen to the podcast and find more ways for how to increase traffic to your Restaurant Website. For most Restaurants, your website is the hub of your online marketing and the start to building a really powerful marketing database. Some Restaurants have databases that generate hundreds of thousands of dollars every month. This can be the start of it for you! Have a listen now, because if your website is working for you, someone else's website will be working for them and they will be getter all of the traffic, all of the leads and all of the customers!
**This WAS meant to go out before the NRA Show in Chicago. Oops sorry. We didn't get a chance to upload it. However, we are going to do a Show special ep covering what we saw, learnt and did along with an ep on a very exciting Restaurant visit that we did and the session with Jon Taffer and Robert Irvine from Bar Rescue and Restaurant Impossible. Stay tuned. We will get these ones out as soon as possible (I am still on the road in Taipei, looking at what tech is going to change Restaurants.) Back on deck next week.
We cover the implications of the Menulog data breach on your Restaurant.
We look at a great way for you to work on creating a Restaurant Marketing Strategy Plan.
If you are opening a Restaurant, you only get one shot at opening night. If it isn't a success, then you are stuck behind the 8 ball trying to build momentum for your Restaurant. It can be hard to get past people's impression of your Restaurant being the one that is always quiet because the locals don't go there. Cash flow is a big thing too for new Restaurants, the sooner you start getting customers, the sooner you will have start getting some cashflow and return on your massive investment in time and money.
We look at the importance of your Marketing Budget, and how to get great logos cheaply.
We spend some time getting you to understand what it is that makes your Restaurant unique. This is important as it can make or break your Restaurant.
We talk about how important it is to hire well before you open.
Getting the menu right is really important. We look at some of the factors taht can make a huge difference in your Restaurants success. The menu is really critical, so make sure you spend enough time before you opening on getting it right.
Facebook and Instagram can make a huge difference too both pre opening and on opening night, so follow our ideas on how to make the most out of these killer social media tools.
Think too about the importance of your domain name. Getting this one right can make a huge difference in your Restaurants profitability.
Bruce Irving, the Founder of Smart Pizza Marketing is one of the foremost experts on Pizza marketing, working with many Pizza Restaurants to help them find more customers and turn them into repeat customers.
In this podcast we discuss how Restaurants are using Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and a range of other tools to build their businesses.
We also look at what is required to build your restaurant from 1 location to multiple locations and the mindset that Bruce sees in his successful Pizza Restaurant customers.
Bruce is a big believer in Snapchat, so have a listen and see how he is using it and how he sees Restaurants using it as well to build a loyal following on this rapidly developing social medium. Some people are picking 2017 to be the year that Snapchat goes mainstream, which means that if you are looking for something to clearly set your Marketing apart from the crowd, now is the time you want to be building up your Snapchat skills and followers.
We talk email marketing and how important it is for Restaurants. Bruce and I share a lot of common thoughts on the power of email marketing, being on medium that Restaurants can truly control.
We look at how Pizza Restaurants can and should compete against third party online ordering companies like Grub Hub and Menulog.
Lastly we talk about Masterminds - getting groups of Restaurant owners together to discuss the issues that everyone has in common to make it easier to run your Restaurant.
In this podcast we look at what the Key Performance Indicators are for your Restaurant Marketing. What gets measured gets managed, so we want to make sure that your are measuring the right KPIs in for your marketing.
Remember - you don't want to have the best Restaurant that no one has ever heard of!
We will look at some metrics from a business and profitability point of view because they are the start of your marketing plan.
We look at how your target market impacts on the types of marketing that you need to do and also we talk about what a Restaurant customers long term customer value is, how you calculate it and how you work to increase it.
We'll take a look at metrics for Facebook marketing, email marketing and making sure that your website is working as hard as it can to find more customers and turn them into repeat customers.
In this episode we discuss some of the ways that successful Restaurants are increasing the number of customers that walk into your Restaurant.
If you have a restaurant with a lot of passing traffic, you won't want to miss this podcast. What is the best way to construct a happy hour offer, what role does your menu play in increasing walk ins and what are some of the mistakes that Restaurants are making with their walk ins.
How can you minimise the risk that potential customers face when thinking about coming into your Restaurant? What is the role of smells in attracting customers and how can you use that to increase customers?
Nothing attracts a queue like a queue, so what can you do to attract a queue.
We also discuss some great ways for getting feedback on why people aren't coming into your Restaurant.
We also look at location as a part of your business plan and how that can impact your marketing plan for walk ins.
We look at ways that Fish and Chip shop owners can find new customers and turn them into repeat customers.
We look at the 2 times that a fish and chip shop customer is looking for a new fish and chip shop and ways that you can target them at those times. How can you use Facebook to find more customers? What is the easiest way to build an email database and how can you introduce efficiencies in your shop?
Many fish and chip shops are very busy on Saturday night, with long wait times for customers. We look at ways to manage this and ensure you don't lose any customers.
We also discuss how 1 restaurant owner discovered a database with 1,500 emails that he didn't know that he had.
Finally we talk business plans and personal plans. Do you have them? Are you on track to achieve your goals. Lots of ideas not just for Fish and Chip shop owners.
In Restaurant Autopsy we discuss the negative impact a hacked website can have and just how quickly it can start to drive customers away.
We talk about how to set up a Restaurant Facebook Page. We give you a complete step by step guide on how to get one set up right the first time.
We have also created a Youtube video, which also goes through the steps so you can see exactly what needs to be done.
Don't forget to check the show notes at www.marketing4restaurants.com/secret-sauce/ for the notes on how to set up your Restaurant's Facebook Page.
We look at the forces that are impacting owners of single location restaurants and small chains.
The factors we discuss are the companies operating in the industry, the evolution of the internet and changing consumer tastes.
The trends that we are seeing as increasing in importance for 2016 are:
Story driven Restaurants
Niche targeting - some restaurants do a great job of targettinangiche
Divergence between low cost / profit restaurants and high profit restaurants
No bookings
Smarter marketing
Menu engineering
The rise of the celebrity chef
Have a listen and see if you are being affected by these trends and how you can better respond to these trends and have a (more) profitable year in 2016 than in 2015.
Listen as we talk Restaurant Success with Eric Cacciatore from Restaurant Unstoppable. Eric is uniquely placed, having interviewed 200 of the United States most successful chefs and restaurant operators. We talk about the critical factors that every Restaurant owner should be thinking about if they want to create success in their Restaurant and in their life.
We talk system, marketing, culture and leadership i this wide ranging podcast which will definitely have something for every Restaurant owner out there to find at least 1 great idea distilled from the experience of hundreds of restaurant owners.
We talk to Tan Terry from Seagulls Greek Taverna, one of our Beta Testers for the Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering system. He ran an online marketing campaign and spent $50 in one day. The result - $1,800 in orders. The night was booming and the kitchen nearly ran out of food. Find out how he did it and also what he can do to improve those numbers.
Marketing your take out orders is going to become more important for every Restaurant as they face increasing competition from Grub Hub, Eat24, Just Eat, Menulog, Zomato, Food Panda and Delivery Hero. All of these online ordering companies compete against Restaurant owners, including those they represent to get the order so that they can charge the Restaurant that big commission and more importantly, get that email address which is critical for database marketing. Tan has done a great job at Seagulls. Not only has he generated an extra $1,800, he has done it Commission free and he is building his own customer database at the same time. Find out how in this episode.
The Fine Food Expo is Australia largest trade show for Restaurants and we visited yesterday to have a look for great ideas to help you with your Restaurant. There are a lot of ways to save money, save time (especially important if it is your time you are saving) and ways to spice up your menu. Your menu is one of your most important tools in sales and marketing. We also look at one of the great tools you can use in costing your menu. We've looked at this in the past, if you haven't costed your menu yet, this is the easiest way to do it.
We talk to Nick Sarillo, authour of A Slice of the Pie, and talk about Purpose and Culture.
We discuss what is Culture, how to come up with your purpose and values, how it can help you with hiring and retention. We also discuss Open Book accounting - what is it, how does it work and how can it benefit your Restaurant.
Nick runs one of the largest independant Pizza Restaurants in the United States and has focused on the Culture at Nick's Pizza and Pub for many years. He has studied widely in the area and has immense practical experience in building a business with a great culture.
We visited Alinea to deconstruct the experience and work out what you can do in your Restaurant to make it a better experience.
Innovation is the overarching theme for us at Alinea. The team at Alinea really are coming up with a lot of great ideas, many of which can inspire you in your restaurant.
Presentation - how can you jazz up your presentation.
Training - the front of house staff were exemplary.
Put all of this that you can do to create an amazing experience because that is where the margin is.
We also discuss the movie Tangerine and what it means for your Restaurant and our Instagram experiment.
We look at Restaurant Fitouts - is it worth spending all that money? We also look at some of the menu ideas that really work to draw customers in. We look at great customer service, great menu items and how Restaurants are using Bartercard to build their business.
In Restaurant Autopsy we look at 2 mistakes that killed one of our favourite local Restaurants. Great food, great value and a great experience wasn't enough to save this Restaurant.
Restaurant Email Marketing is one of the secret ways that many really successful Restaurants use to drive people to the quiet times of the week and the quiet times of the day. We cover the tools you need to gather emails automatically, to email out to those emails and to measure the effectiveness of your email campaign. Best practise email campaigns can add over $100,000 of Revenue to your Restaurant, so why aren't you sending emails out today?
We look at Restaurant Marketing from the customers persepctive as we go in search of great restaurants with great marketing to help you better understand how customers are looking for places to eat. This episode covers our last trip to San Francisco, where we some some great marketing and eat at some great Restaurants. More importantly, we look at some restaurants that we didn't visit. You rarely find out why a customer didn't come in, but in this episode we discover some of the things that can make a customer go else where.
Database marketing means an end to the quiet nights of the week in your Restaurant. Whether it is email marketing, SMS, or even direct mail, a Database creates a huge advantage for your Restaurant. It will even increase the value of your Restaurant when you want to sell it. We will cover what a database is, how to create and grow one and some of the ways you can use it to increase profitability in your Restaurant. Discover how successful Restaurateurs use their database every week to grow their business, more importantly we've got a great way to do Database marketing whenyou don't have a database.
Many Restaurants have awesome looking websites. Many Restaurants pay thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on great looking websites, but many Restaurants don't have websites that are lead magnets, drawing in new customers day in and day out.
Your website should do the sales and marketing. Your content is the SEO marketing and the desing is the sales. In this episode, we look at getting the balance right. We look at some case studies and show how a little tweaking can make a big difference in the traffic that a Restaurant website receives, the bookings you take and ultimately your Restaurant revenue and profit.
Facebook is the Number 1 Social Media Marketing platform for many Restaurants. We look at some of the mistakes that people make with their Facebook page and some great examples of Facebook tactics to build your Community. We also go through the different types of content that work well on Facebook. More importanmtly we talk about ways to generate that Facebook content as quickly and easily as possible.
SEO is a critical part of any online marketing recipe. It is also an area that many Restaurants lose thousands of customers a year becuase they haven't got it right. Discover the Secret of Restaurant SEO and learn how you can improve the targeting of your customers quickly and easily with much better SEO for your Restaurant website.
We look at 8 ways that you can increase the numbers of customers to your Restaurant during the quiet times of the week. Joint venture marketing, theme nights, corporate customers and happy hours are all some of the ideas that we will be looking at and more to help you find new customers and turn them into repeat customers.
Intro Episode: How do you find the Secret Sauce for your Restaurant and a little bit about the team from Marketing4Restaurants.com. Who we are and why we do what we do for Restaurants. Together let’s find the ingredients for your Secret Sauce.